Loud And Quiet 10 – Erol Alkan

LoudAndQuiet Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 10 / 100 percent trash

EROL N o c e le b r it y DJ +

M o n oto n i x – N o d z z z – Ve r o n i ca Fa l ls C o ld P u mas – D eath I n P lai n s Pai n s Of B e i n g P u r e At H eart – E gyptian Hi p H o p Ti m e s N ew Vi k i n g – Off s et F e stival

... Get Me To read from PRATS: Primary rules About The Stars: “Having gained notoriety, the pop star should time leaving Bungalow 8 to coincide with Fearne and Reggie’s departure; they should lend their face to a high street fashion collection for young estate agents; they should inform the paparazzi where they plan to eat lunch at least once a week and promptly blame their uncontrollable cocaine addiction on ‘the stresses of fame and lack of privacy’. Pictures of the pop star tooting large amounts of gak [coke] up their beak [nose] are a great way to secure valuable publicity. So too is making a sex tape with Dane Bowers, Paris Hilton, Abi Titmuss or any other minor celebrity mentioned in chapter 6 – ‘When Your Mouth’s Full, So is Your Bank Account’.”

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Outta The celebrity game sure is played by the book these days, and yet Erol Alkan – the man who invented the indie disco, gave us that ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ remix and produced two of the best albums of 2008 – has always shied away from the spotlight. In the past he has rarely sat for interviews and that’s not about to change just because he’s finally releasing music under his own name. In fact, our cover feature is the only ‘on record’ chat Alkan will be tolerating in the near future.

Dance music’s very own Yeti and Bigfoot in one, he remains as aloof as a world famous DJ possibly can be, busy creating beats and bangers, not headlines. Erol continues to ignore PRATS.

Here > www.loudandquiet.com

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10 | 09 LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 10 / 100 PERCENT TRASH

EROL NO C E LE B R IT Y DJ +

M O N OTO N I X – N O D Z Z Z – VE R O N I CA FA LLS C O LD P U M AS – D EAT H I N P LA I N S PA I N S O F B E I N G P U R E AT H EA R T – E GYP T IA N H I P H O P T I M E S N EW VI K I N G – O F F S ET F E ST IVA L

Photography by Phil sharp

07 .................. . Romance / In / Lidl 08 .................. . Dirty / Golden / Grrrls 10 .................. . Peaches / Loves / Fighstar 12 .................. . 80’s / Sick / Hop 14 .................. . Bum / Cheeks / Chaos 16 .................. . Fuck / Mario / Over 17 .................. . Pat / Sharp’s / Mullet 22 .................. . Risky / White / Dwarves 25 .................. . Disgusting / Models / Dribble 29 .................. . Fearne / And / Reggie 35 .................. . My / Smooth / Inch 37 .................. . Eggs / Of / Dreams 41 .................. . Let’s / Get / Personal 42 .................. . Clumsy / Wife / Tales 46 .................. .Flabby / Man / Boobs 04

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Contact

info@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet 2 Loveridge Mews Kilburn London NW6 2DP Stuart Stubbs Alex Wilshire Art Director Lee Belcher film editor Dean Driscoll Editor

Sub Editor

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advertise@loudandquiet.com Contributors

Anna Dobbie, Ben Parkes, Chris Watkeys, Danny Canter Danielle Goldstien, Dean Driscoll Eleanor Dunk, Elinor Jones Edgar Smith, Elizabeth Dodd Kate Hutchinson, Kate Parkin Kelda Hole, Mandy Drake Matthias Scherer, Nathan Westley Owen Richards, Polly Rappaport Phil Sharp, Reef Younis, Sam Little, Sam Walton, Simon Leak Tim Cochrane,Tom Goodwyn This Month L&Q Loves

Nita Keeler, Ruth Drake Stephen Watson,Tina Covington Will Laurence The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opini ons of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2009 © Loud And Quiet.

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Island in the (main) Stream Forget its muddied recent past; Island Records should be remembered as the most inspiring indie label of all time Wr i t e r : S t u a r t s t u bb s

On their terrestrial channels, the BBC does little to warrant us paying our TV licences. Even Strictly Come Dancing is failing to draw in celebrities for our amusement these days. In ITV’s opposing trash cannon is the ratings-giant-come-intelligencesiphon X Factor and brilliantly naff new game show The Cube, which fills in the gaps between Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and a Lidl Matrix. Primetime Beeb is taking a pounding. Over on BBC4 though, last month saw the most inspirational documentary of the year, Do It Yourself – The Story Of Rough Trade, trumped by an even more impressive record label tale, Keep On Running – 50 Years of Island Records.

Now, you wince because Island is the label responsible for some of the most turgid records in recent years. Keane, The Fratellis, Frank Musik, The Feeling, The Rumble Strips, Tommy Sparks, Remi Nicole; they’ve cursed us with them all and offered very little by way of compensation. But before these musical faux pas – and, more importantly, before label founder Chris Blackwell left the company in 1997 – Island was the most eclectic and sincere record company to have existed.

Founded by Blackwell – an Englishman by blood but Jamaican at heart (he spent his childhood on the Caribbean island) – the totally independent company was forged in 1959 and set about releasing ska artists like Derek

Morgan, Jimmy Cliff and Desmond Decker. Relocating to England in 1962, Blackwell would sell his early releases to the Jamaican community from the boot of his car, but it wouldn’t be long until Island would need a much bigger vehicle to flog their vinyls from.

In ’64 Blackwell produced and released Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’, which promptly sold 6 million copies, launching Island into an unknown world where an independent label could compete with the mainstream. As the ’60s neared their apathetic end and prog/rock replaced the hippy ideal, Island followed the success of Traffic and Jethro Tull with King Crimson and Free. Once the latter band had released ‘Alright Now’ in 1970, it looked like the label might have reached the ceiling of its self-funded success, and then Cat Stephens (until then a major label pop star product) and Blackwell hatched a plan for the solo singer to release his next album via the indie.

Tied into a deal with A&M, Stephen’s wasn’t obliged to release another album without wanting to but once he had another record for the shop shelves, A&M had first dibs on it.

He wanted to reclaim his independence and become an Island artist but his hands were tied, until Blackwell suggested that Stephens went back to A&M to let them know he was ready to record his next record… with the Royal

Philharmonic Orchestra. Knowing the label’s finance dept. would never sign off such a request, Blackwell had saved Cat Stephens from a lifetime of writing records for a faceless major conglomerate.

Tales of Blackwell scams and gestures of confidence beyond anything seen by label bosses before are strune the length and breadth of Island’s history. On meeting them in 1974, he was so become with Bob Marley and The Wailers he asked them how much money they’d need to make their album and swiftly handed them a cheque for the told amount.

Having not signed a thing, and after a short introduction, The Wailers returned to Jamaica £4000 richer. Two months later Blackwell travelled to Jamaica to see if his money had been used how he had hoped. It had, and, with his trust returned, The Wailers became the boss’ newest signing. Similarly rejecting the tried and tested unforgiving label bod shtick, after U2’s second album flopped – the preachy, overtly Catholic ‘October’ – Blackwell refused to drop the band against his better judgement and gave them a third swipe at stardom.

Blackwell obviously didn’t create the largest independent label in history (as Island was in by the time he sold it to Polygram in 1989) on generosity and understanding alone though – his sharp ear for new music was a neat and useful tool also. His

success with Jimmy Cliff came after years of patience and the eventual arrival of ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’, but spotting the potential in Roxy Music when most would have dismissed them as ponced-up blouses was key to Island’s success. He knew ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ was a sure hit, and that U2 deserved a third chance.

Above everything though, Chris Blackwell ran Island as a fan, first and foremost. His business head was firmly screwed on but his passion for eclectic music never wavered either. He’d produce his artists himself when he could and sat not in a platinum plastered office but with the rest of his staff, forever the man that started by selling his own records from the back of a hatchback. Twenty years after Island’s birth, Rough Trade launched in a similarly idealistic way, and as such is considered the unchallengeable blueprint for running an independent record company. In truth, Island forged a far more interesting ‘business’ mould.

Rough Trade’s punk aesthetic was brilliant but blinkered; Island embraced more cultures and genres than any label before or since.

They’re the reggae label that signed the biggest band on the planet, the most recognisable face in black music, the princes of new romance… and The Buggles.

We never said they were perfect.

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Books

By Janine & Lee Bullman

The Death of Bunny Munro

By Nick Cave (Canongate Press) Cave has some graphic thoughts under that black mop of his ---------------------

tape that To celebrate our first club tour we’re scratching an itch we’ve had for years

Bunny Munro, the bequiffed, irresponsible anti-hero of Nick Cave’s second novel, is a helpless slave to the myriad of full tilt, X-rated desires which both drive and damn him. A traveling salesman by trade, Bunny’s explicit interior monologue consists of a blurred cornucopian stream of unchecked, unfiltered visions of porn and narcotica. His behavior throughout remains unchecked, despite the presence of his young son, a (particularly well written) character whose tenderness serves all the more to underline his father’s relentless depravity. Good ending, too. Not for the squeamish perhaps, but it was never going to be Mills and Boon now, was it?

Wr i t e r : D a n n y C a n t e r

Kid British - the faux cockney/ Manc reggae/’punk’ geez band whose existence calls for Jamie T’s influential head to be brought to us on a spike, NOW! last month released their debut album, ‘It Was This or Football’. Presuming they’re telling the truth, Kid British made the wrong choice.

Regardless, this band of scallies picked their path and for the next week or two – while they still have a record deal – will no doubt feel pretty pleased with themselves.

For us it wasn’t this or kicking a sack of air about, but rather this or an independent record label. Geoff Travis’ Rough Trade model inspired us, but so too did The Stool Pigeon and what the UK’s independent music press used to be.

Eventually we decided to remain idle fans of bedroom labels like Merok, Young & Lost and UTR and put issue one of our printed fanzine into production. Four years later, we’ve never regretted choosing print over audio, but the desire to release music has continued to nag at us. So, ending the torment, we’ve finally decided to launch a little side project called Loud And Quiet Cassettes.

As the name suggests, we’ll crackle and fizz into the world

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of recorded sound, until your play button clunks up to signal that it’s time for side 2. We’re keeping it simple and analogue, inspired to do so by tape label Suplex Cassettes. And our debut release is almost ready to go.

Next month our club night (a team effort with pals Dirty Bingo) hits the road as we take San Diego garage-gazers Crocodiles to 5 UK cities in as many days. Starting in Glasgow on October 19th, we’ll stop off in Sheffield, Manchester and Brighton en route to a final show in London where the band promise a special surprise. Each stop on the mini tour will also see two local bands complete the bill every night.

‘Crocodiles Tour Tape ‘09’, then, will be a 6-track compilation featuring the Californian duo, plus 5 of the support bands we’re so pleased to have involved. The tapes will feature exclusive tracks recorded especially for this release, be limited to 100 copies and initially sold exclusively at the live shows.

They’ll cost £3.50 each and be individually numbered. The complete track listing of the release will be posted at www. loudandquiet.com soon and tickets for the entire tour are on sale now, also via our

website. In the meantime, below is the complete lineup of who’ll be sharing a stage with Crocodiles in each city and a hint to who might appear on the first ever release by Loud And Quiet Cassettes.

Our tape label is now open for business and living at www. myspace.com/ loudandquietcassettes. Providing we don’t get complete closure from just one release we plan to put out more EPs and compilations in the new year so get in touch and help us scratch our restless itch.

----------Tour Dates Oct 19th Glasgow Stereo with GOLDEN GRRRLS + DIVORCE ----------Oct 20th Sheffield Plug with THE HIPSHAKES + SPECTRALS ----------Oct 21st Manchester Night & Day Cafe with MAZES + EGYPTIAN HIP HOP ----------Oct 22nd Brighton Audio with COLD PUMAS + LA LA VASQUES ----------Oct 23rd London, The Victoria with TEEN SHEIKHS + CHEATAHS

The Long Player Goodbye

By Travis Elborough (Sceptre) Forget Spotify, CDs and MP3s; Elborough never embraced them --------------------Travis Elborough’s potted history of the trials and tribulations of the vinyl LP format makes for fascinating, insightful, and often hilarious reading. His deep affection for his subject is obvious throughout as he leads us on a journey from the format’s first appearance as a possible replacement for the outmoded 78s, to the threat to its dominance by the introduction of the space-age-buta-bit-crap-really compact disc. An absolute must for anyone who can’t walk past a charity shop without popping in and flicking through the albums, or taken the time to wonder who this Ray Coniff chap is, exactly.

Marvelous.

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Here’s our posthardcore reunion wishlist: Fugaz i Vocalists Guy Picciotto and Ian McKaye were among the founders of post-hardcore, Picciotto in one of the first post-hardcore and emo groups Rites of Spring and McKaye in hardcore punkers Minor Threat. But together with their Fugazi bandmates, and their rigid DIY ethos, they pushed the boundaries of punk and hardcore music.

------------M i l l i o n Dea d

back to schools Kate Hutchinson demands a post-hardcore revival, with Rival Schools at the top of the class

It felt like we’d finally erased the last memories of our teenage nu-metal fashion faux pas – remember those parachute-leg jeans that soaked up to the knee on a rainy day and unwieldy chain belts that could give you concussion? – and then Download festival announced its line-up this year with a razor-sharp reminder of our backwards capwearing yoof.

Apparently, Korn, Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach and even Staind (ick) still have a place in our nostalgia-heavy hearts.

All that was missing was Linkin Park, a pre-loungecore Incubus and Disturbed to complete MTV2’s entire video rotation circa 2000.

In fact, the majority of Download’s headliners were a flash from the past. But not all flashes were wince-inducing.

There was also the subtle smack of golden-era post-hardcore from New York’s finest, Rival Schools.

They were the ultimate hardcore super group, an amalgamation of former Gorilla Biscuits and Quicksand frontman Walter Schreifels, who, prior to that, was also in Youth of Today with Civ’s drummer Sam Siegler, also in the band. Add to that bassist Cache Tolman from Iceburn and guitarist Ian Love, and theirs resulted in a more melodic,

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uplifting alt.rock sound than their previous incarnations.

Zane Lowe even declared them as his favourite band ever (in the days before he said that about every band).

But sadly, Rival Schools suffered a similar end to the original Emo peers: their career dissolved before they’d barely finished promoting their impressive debut album, ‘United

By Fate’. Still, their virtual non-success has awarded them a cultish status – so much so that when The Offspring and Deftones toured here last month, they snapped up the ’Schools as their opening band. After all, if numetal can make a comeback then so can post-hardcore, right?

Right! We went along to their Deftones gig, not purely for sentimental reasons and to clarify that their signature tune ‘Used For Glue’ is one of the great alternative anthems of the noughties, but also to hear their new post-hardcore pearls: ‘Big Waves’, ‘Sophia Loren’, ‘On The Frey’ and ‘Paranoid Detectives’. The band were back last year to play, but now, with exciting new material, does this officially herald post-hardcore’s return, I wondered?

Well, yes, but if this gig is anything to go by, they’re going to need some help. Quicksand

once shared a bill with the Californian yelp-metallers back in 1998, but here the droves of gothic girls touting brightly coloured dreads and their thickset boyfriends are nonplussed. That Rival Schools swapped an intimate comeback gig in Nottingham for this London support slot could have something to do with former Quicksand member Sergio Vega’s appearance on bass in place of injured Deftone Chi Cheng, but, sadly, they conjure an atmosphere as well as Peaches Geldof wields her fountain pen.

It’s not that they’re not great – they are, bar the muddy sound of The Forum – but rather they’re back when their contemporaries are doing ‘weird stuff’ like protest folk and prog rock projects.

True, post-hardcore has never been an easy genre to define (for just some of the arguments, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Talk:Post-hardcore) but at a time when bands like Enter Shikari and Fightstar are key examples on Wikipedia, we would like all its brilliant bands of yore to step forward and reclaim this flickering torch. And just when the art of the comeback is all the rage too (aren’t we thoughtful?).

Frank Turner, enough of your Billy Childish-channelling protest-folk procrastinations already. Ditch the Vocalzone and pork pie hat and reform your brilliant, face-shredding quartet.

------------J . Majes ty For years we heard and loved the funk twangs of ‘No School’ but had no idea who this post-hardcore band were (not even Pitchfork has a biography page for them!). So now you all need to.

------------Q u i c k san d If you must insist that Quicksand were much better than Rival Schools.

------------At T h e D r i v e I n El Paso’s riff monsters disbanded to form The Mars Volta and Sparta, but ‘Relationship of Command’ perfectly demonstrates the balance between discordant, melodic and radiofriendly; a style that has been aped by myriads of bands ever since.

------------Re f u se d Swedish experimental and political post-hardcore-ers whose 1998 fulllength album ‘The Shape of Punk To Come’ was number 28 in Kerrang’s 50 Most Important Albums Of All Time in 2006.

------------Fi nch Post-hardcore rolled up into one uber emo burrito. No, wait, you were like the American Funeral For A Friend. Ugh. You had lyrics like ‘your picture still remains / but I wonder are you still the same?’

Double-ugh! Too bad you’re already touring again.

Egyptian Hip Hop /

...are a hard band to pin down. After a last minute dash to mancheter, kate parkin gets them all together to discuss Johnny Marr, Oasis and the improbable explanation for their band namE P h o t o g r a p h e r : to m c o c k r a m Wr i t e r : k at e pa r k i n

Shuffling uncomfortably at the prospect of a grilling, singer/ bass player Alex Hewett fiddles with his lighter, nearly setting fire to the table while his band mates bicker quietly in the background. Finally, guitarist Nick Delap chimes in: “I liked it when I Googled Egyptian Hip Hop and it found stuff, that was pretty cool.”

Keyboardist Louis StevensonMiller: “It was funny having people hearing about us…”

Drummer/second keyboardist Alex Pierce: “My mum hearing about us…”

Soon the stoic silence is replaced by a mass of voices talking over each other, with manager Max given the unenviable job of reigning in the chaos.

The band are all 17, still at college and only started playing as Egyptian Hip Hop less than a year ago, guitarist Nick being the most recent addition to the line-up.

Their band name has caused some puzzlement, so we attempt to coax out an explanation.

“Eurgh, it’s really boring,” starts Louis “but we sort of made something up to make it more exciting, give it more mystique...”

“There was a paper aeroplane flying along and it hit Alex (Pierce) in the eye,” tells Nick “and we opened it and it said Egyptian Hip Hop on it.”

“Yeah, we don’t know where the paper aeroplane came from,” says Hewett “we think it came from Egypt really, from Cairo.”

Nick: “We fished it out of the Nile, with a submarine. Splash!”

Hewett (miming the actions): “The paper aeroplane made its way down the Nile in a Hippo that squirted it out of its blowhole.”

With regret, I inform him that, sadly, Hippos don’t live in the Nile, or indeed have blowholes.

Louis laughs: “That’s why you’ve never been to a zoo, the

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most exciting thing you’ve ever seen is a guinea pig.”

Hewett trails off: “I went to a rabbit farm once…”

With a gift for storytelling on a par with Let’s Wrestle, the nature of EHH’s influences are no less complicated. Alex Pierce starts with, “Errr, Donny Osmond”, Louis offers up Talking Heads (“Yeah, David Byrne, what a guy!” interjects Pierce) and throws in The Smiths, before Hewett tells us how Johnny Marr taught Nick to play guitar, even though his friend “listens to Blink 182.”

After the Hippo with a blowhole, we can believe everything or nothing Egyptian Hip Hop say, and choosing the former seems like a hell of a lot more fun.

Their first live show was a spot on BBC Manchester’s Raw Talent in March, swiftly followed by airplay on Steve Lamacq’s radio show and tip off’s in the Independent’s playlist.

Hewett and Nick had already had their first taste of fame appearing at a Skins party whilst making up two thirds of electro scuzz band Copycats.

Pierce also makes his own music and remixes under the guise of masked crusader, Leveret.

Finally, Nick explains the Johnny Marr connection. “I was in band with his son and JM, from now on he’s called JM! He gave me some trainers.”

“He thought you were poor!” puts down a grinning Louis. “… and some guitar pedals and loads of Krispy Kreme donuts,” continues Nick, undeterred.

“Was that the high point?”

Hewett interjects, incredulously “that you got a crappy donut?!”

Descriptions of Egyptian Hip Hop’s music range from ‘lush scuzzy pop’, to the less imaginative ‘doss wave’ and ‘post math-rock’. The chiming keyboards and dreamy vocals of ‘Heavenly’ definitely feature at

the lusher end of the spectrum, while ‘Rad Pitt’ is more resolutely post punk.

“We always say pyramid pop,” explains Alex “just to be awkward.”

“We could be ‘Math Goths,’” suggests Hewett, followed by Nick quoting a recent NME review: “Definitely ‘Mancunian Post 8 bit dosh wave’,” he smiles. “I play ‘post math dosh rock.”

“The thing is,” says Hewett, stopping the meaningless and growingly absurd descriptions “we don’t know ourselves what it is, so they can’t even come close to what we think.”

“Anti-genre” and “sound unit” manage to sneak out when Hewett suddenly breaks off fascinated, peering at my papers. “You’ve got notes?” he says surprised.

“That guy earlier didn’t, did he?” adds Louis. “He wasn’t very good.”

Pierce: “He wanted us to talk about the 80’s revival and stuff. Wanted to see what we thought about La Roux and all those bands.”

Hewett then drops his lighter down a crack in the table and lets out a lament of, “Oh fuck, I always do that and then regret it!” and causes a confused Louis to look up apologetically.

“Sorry, what was the question?”

Despite being local lads, Egyptian Hip Hop don’t fit the mould of a stereotypical Manchester band and hate the generic, Brit Pop-honed, ‘Lad Rock’ sound. Contemplating the recent Oasis split, Louis says, “Loads of people see Manchester bands as bands like Oasis and I sort of want to change that.”

Up coming gigs with Django Django, Copy Haho and Good Shoes, as well as a Loud And Quiet tour show with Crocodiles and Mazes, the next few months are set to be busy ones. There’s even a mini-documentary set to be shown soon on Channel 4.

“They recorded us in our

rehearsal room, when we had one,” explains Hewett.

“Yeah, we got kicked out for being bad boys!” adds Nick.

Hewett: “Badass! There was graffiti in the hall or something.”

So now the band are searching for a basement that can accommodate their vandalistic tendencies, while Nick is also branching out with new band The Youth Gang. Pierce is also set to record some tracks in his Leveret guise with electro pioneer Danimal Kingdom.

And amongst external projects, plans to record an Egyptian Hip Hop album are well under way, with Sam Eastgate of Late of the Pier on producing duties.

After extolling the virtues of Mount Eeerie, Sir Yes Sir, Iranian Pop and Russian Church Rock, while Hewett sits readjusting his mountainous indie mop, Louis adds, “Dutch Uncles are going to do a second album, probably a lot better than their first. They’re pretty underrated.”

“The Mandigans, they’re pretty sick,” says Nick of bands Egyptian Hip Hop are currently excited about.

“The Harks,” offers a sarcastic Hewett “or what about The Harringtons, and that fucking lame ass indie?”

“Is every interview you do going to be about The Harringtons and how shit they are?” says Louis, turning to the bassist. But as Egyptian Hip Hop seemingly tend to do, the conversation has already moved on without the need of answers being given to trivial questions or thoughts.

Melodic grunge, doss wave or pyramid pop, who cares? Egyptian Hip Hop make dreamy slices of electro induced grooves that traverse boundaries and defy labels. That’s well worth crossing the Nile for, with or without the promise of Hippos.

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Be If Monotonix’s debut album failed to excite as much as you’d hoped, their live show definitely doesn’t disappoint P h o t o g r a p h e r : O w e n Ri c h a r d s Wr i t e r : S t u a r t s t u bb s

‘Where Were You When It Happened?’ – the debut album from Israeli trio Monotonix – is a good-but-not-great record. If you believe our last issue, it’s a 6. Heavy on bluesy distortion and so light on low end it’s void of any bass, it sounds something like an unhinged Black Keys angling for Led Zeppelin and hitting Pearl Jam – all cock-extending riffs and fuzzy vocals. It’s a solid listen; far from a shameful first go but also a stretch from anyone’s rock album of the year.

Live though, Ami [vocals], Yonatan [guitar] and Haggai [drums] offer the punk show of your life – Lightning Bolt by way of semi-naked My Name Is Earls; the funk of Rage Against The Machine without the righteous politics; a hairy, sweaty master class in performer/audience relations; the most entertaining thing we’ve seen since ever. We know this because we’ve watched Ami’s bum cheeks clamp some poor voyeur’s face, Haggai chase his drum kit around the room whilst

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his singer pours Guinness, beer and all other fluids in reach on his head, and the whole band perform above us and under our arms. Their Islington Garage gig was wild.

“It wasn’t too wild to tell you the truth,” says Ami, a man whose eyes bulge out of his face like a pantomimic WF wrestler “not compared to Leeds. It was really crowded there – you couldn’t move. People got wild, but not wild in a violent way, it’s wild because people dance and get free.”

Remember that – Ami’s trainer sole in your cheek is not violence; it’s getting free. Him snatching your pint isn’t bullying either, it’s just part of the show, and Monotonix shows are all about letting yourself go. Watching from afar, safe at the back of a soon-to-beslippery venue is not an option, because before two sleazy tracks are over you’ll be at the front, and not because you’ve been unwillingly bumped forward by those around you.

At the Garage’s not-so-wild

[pfft] tour stop, the band positioned their drums and guitar amp on the floor just in front of the stage and skulked around their setup in short shorts and little else. The eager sweat glands and handlebar moustaches added to the menace and tension. Still, we wanted to see if ‘Where Were You…’ really could sound as unprocessed as we’d heard it does when played live, so the front was for us.

Before singing a word, Ami then finds the bar, mounts it and jumps feet first into the crowd.

Held aloft, he trudges overhead like a bloodthirsty Viking wading in mud, back to his starting point. Pint 1 over Haggai, who will later display the ability to continue drumming with his front man’s face in his lap and balls on his shoulder (simultaneously), this is how Monotonix say hello. And then the room explodes. Instantly.

There’s no warm up or gentle bobbing to a song or two; The Garage is suddenly a scene of complete chaos.

The front row becomes the

hair back as the band soon drag their kit to the other end of the room (followed by the centre of the bar, the merch stall, and every other square metre of the venue to prove there really is no such thing as a safe corner to simply watch Monotonix from); Ami repeatedly hoists himself in the air, knocks over peoples’ drinks and – most worryingly of all – wipes his mooning arse with the microphone before continuing to bark inaudible lyrics. Maybe those rumours about being banned from all of the venues in their hometown of Tel Aviv are true.

“Yes, it’s true,” confirms Ami “because people are kind of conservative about live shows and rock’n’roll. When we started to play, 80 percent of our shows were ended by the police or the owner of the venue saying we’ve trashed his place. We don’t really play right now, back home. And it’s fine by me – I’m not angry about it or at anybody. We should play everywhere that fits to this [music], not places that don’t.”

A proud Israeli, Ami is also something of an anglophile, and a man far more calm and respectful than his band’s live shows suggest. He performs as if high on something way more synthetic than life alone, and

yet he doesn’t even drink, especially before a gig. Right now he’s listening to little more than ‘Odessey and Oracle’

by The Zombies, and when he’s not talking about rock’n’roll, he’s enthusing about football.

It’s no wonder his band spend most of their time away from Tel Aviv, touring Monotonix through lands that welcome their tastes.

“The UK tour was really great this time,” he smiles. “We get the feeling that people in the UK really, really get into rock’n’roll. UK/rock’n’roll, it’s basically the same thing.

It’s really different from Israel; rock’n’roll is not really in the culture. There’s a lot of people that like to go to shows but not like in the UK or US; people didn’t grow up on this kind of music. In the UK, our drummer went to a bar and he told me that he was sitting with people who were around 50 and they listened to The Rolling Stones and Black Sabbath; you can’t even dream of people listening to this kind of music.

But these are your bands. This is your music.”

‘Where Were You When it Happened?’ (named so because “it’s a universal phrase… and has lots of Ws”) was recorded in New Orleans and Ami admits that

now capturing the band’s live energy on record is always at the forefront of their minds.

He ponders: “This is the one million dollar question for us – how to get the live energy into the record. We started writing the songs in the breaks between tours and then we took two months in New Orleans, got into the studio and played like we play a show. No overdubs, just played like the live show. BUT, if you play so free and so loose like a live show, when you listen to it on your stereo it sounds too sloppy. We call it the golden line, between this and this. I hope that we’ve done it this time.”

And if people think you haven’t? If Monotonix are still considered a live band over a studio band?

“We’re doing our best in live shows, we’re doing our best in the studio, and I think it’s tied together. If people buy our record because of the live show, fine. If they come and see a show because they like our record, that’s fine too. I don’t mind if people only want to come and see us and drink and dance or whatever.”

Equally as optimistic, Ami has no desire to protest how worthy his lyrics are either –

“They’re simple,” he says “it’s not politics, it’s not poetry, it’s only rock’n’roll.” – which is something of a relief considering how difficult they are to decipher when he’s sat on a spare drum stool, 10 feet in the air.

But what happens when climbing onto bars requires a Stannah stair lift? Or when falling out of a dustbin and breaking your shoulders means you can’t finish a show, regardless (true story)?

“I wanna work on a sports channel,” says Ami, excitedly.

“There’s a really great show that’s on during the UEFA Champions League, and I wanna be in the studio and be one of the wise guys that makes jokes, because I really love soccer.

It’s my favourite channel on TV, always the sport. The soccer in Israel really sucks, but it’s okay, it’s ours.”

I want to tell Ami that I don’t think Alan Hanson got his pundit job for his ability to make jokes, but it can wait.

Monotonix still have plenty of venues to go wild in yet. And for the record, when it happened we were there, with a shoe in our face and a pint on our head, realising that all rock shows should be as fun as Monotonix’s.

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02 Death In Plains Warp-esque IDM from an italian who’s more than a musician P h o t o g r a p h e r : o w e n r i c h a r d s Wr i t e r : N at h a n W e s t l e y

There is little denying that Italy has been responsible for producing some of history’s most culturally potent artists; a beehive of creativity, it unleashes photographers, fashion designers and visual artists into the world’s consciousness on a regular basis.

Yet it’s not been since electronic maestro Giorgio Moroder first arose to prominence that its musical outpourings have had any major impact and it’s a problem that laptop abuser and serial sound manipulator Enrico Boccioletti – better known as Death In Plains – is taking steps to put right.

Sat outside, basking in the sun shortly after playing the Experimental Circle Club stage at Offset Festival, Enrico is found in a positively upbeat mood. Like with most musical projects, Death In Plains grew from simple beginnings – “I played in another band called Damian,” he says “that was my main project until I started doing this thing by myself about one year ago; it was originally done for fun in my bedroom” – but into an unexpected and very much welcome long term adventure it soon grew.

“The name was originally

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Death in Donut Plains, from the game Super Mario World for the SNES,” smiles the experimental musician. “It was one of my favourite games when I was a kid and Donut Plains was one of the first stages. I changed the name as I didn’t feel it naturally suited my stuff anymore. I wanted something less funny, something that reflected the music, something that was both darker and more open. Death in Plains – you don’t know what it means, it could mean a lot of different things.”

This desire to not book-end is something that is also very much reflected in the music that Enrico sketches out; a blend of electronic shoe gaze and intelligent dance music that puts him in the same musical sphere as such luminaries as M83, Fuck Buttons and Aphex Twin. Take this all into consideration and it is with little wonder that he describes his outpourings as being “Electronic Shoe-gazery” as he digests and remoulds the same initial influences, albeit in a slightly different way.

Freely admitting that he likes “layers of sounds”, his music is often complex in design, yet when transposed to a

live environment it takes on a looser more liberated angle.

“Sometimes I play guitar on stage,” he explains “at other times keyboards; it’s an open, evolving thing. It didn’t start out with a live dimension as it started in a bedroom setting.

Usually I play alone, sometimes my friends from other bands will play drums, it can work both ways, every time can be different.”

It’s this desire to not be 100% regimented to a static idea that helps separate Death in Plains from others programming loops and walls of sound at the moment, and he reassures that there are plans to take the live experience further, almost turning it into an art installation.

“I’d like to bring some animated visuals onstage as I’m making that kind of stuff. I was thinking about bringing animations onstage, Polaroid collages and stuff like that, maybe next time.”

With not much time to pass before he returns to his abode, he describes his home country as being one that it is very difficult to gain much recognition in. “It’s kind of funny to come from Italy to

here, I like a lot of the stuff that comes from the UK. In Italy you have a lot of crap bands.

There is some quality stuff but it’s difficult to emerge or for them to go and play abroad as we don’t have a proper economic system for alternative and leftfield stuff. It’s a really small small small circle, even the fanbase is just people from other bands, it’s a scene that celebrates itself; it is very very small.”

At present most future plans remain sketchy at best, the one fully concrete is that “There’s one song called ‘Over and Above’ that’s coming out as a 7” single on Disc Error Recordings. It has remixes by both Passions and Jack from These New Puritans”.

“I’d like to do remixes myself sooner or later. I’m going to make one for a new band called New Islands,” he offers in the hope of further enhancing the notion that things like his music should not be too willingly pigeon-holed or pushed in one firm direction; that things should instead be left room to mutate and evolve naturally, like a funny name gone serious or a bedroom side project turned obsession.

03 Veronica Falls Winning hearts, plaudits from New york hipsters, and maybe a goldfish or two P h o t o g r a p h e r : Pav l a Ko p e c n a Wr i t e r : I a n R o e b u c k

Ask your average sultry, shoepondering band if they’d prefer a record fair or a Fun Fair and no doubt most would choose an afternoon sifting through dust smothered vinyl. Not Veronica Falls. Following a well-received set in the leafy suburbs of Herne Hill, the band are faced with a dilemma – musty backroom, full of halves of mild and Kate Bush castaways, or carnage at the funhouse? Before you can say Pat Sharp’s mullet, the foursome are dodgem-bound with lead singer Roxanne explaining this wouldn’t even be her first visit.

“It’s not really a ride but I went to the funhouse in here and it’s terrible,” she says. “I normally love the funhouse!”

It’s not for everyone though, and this tight-knit foursome aren’t unanimously crazy for carny folk – “I don’t really like rides, I find it all a bit weird,” says James, bouncing off Roxanne as his vocals and guitar did on stage earlier.

Connections at Glasgow Art School and a shared love of Comet Gain have given Veronica Falls a backbone, and it clearly shows. Warmth envelopes each song as cascading guitars fill every story Roxanne eases into existence with her delicate voice. DIY perhaps, but they can

certainly play, and have experience on their side also.

Formed from the ashes and uprights of The Royal We, Sexy Kids and Your Twenties, they have a musical schooling in place (James still plays for YT, and when asked if this bothers the rest of the band they all reply in unison ‘yeah it does actually’, tongues firmly in cheek… perhaps). Crash-coursing her way into the band, Marion, having taught herself bass in a month, epitomises the gang mentality and inclusive spirit.

“We didn’t want to audition people we didn’t like and we all wanted her in with us so much,” explained Roxanne who seems to have done a better job than blood – “My Dad’s a bass player and he’d being trying to teach me since I was 2!” laughs Marion.

Drummer Patrick thrusts us back into realms of the Fun Fair as he reminisces on his time living in New York. “Do you remember that incredible funhouse in Coney Island?” he asks his band. “It’s classed as a listed building and it has one of the earliest roller coasters in the world in it.”

Clearly they would be at home at both the record and Fun Fair but Patrick gained more from his

visit to New York than just a candyfloss addiction. Making good friends with Mike Sniper’s (aka Blank Dogs’) Captured Tracks label meant his band were soon on the radar of Brooklyn’s indie elite. Very soon in fact – “They somehow contacted us after we had a MySpace page for just one hour!” recount a still very pleased Veronica Falls.

Indeed, that’s fast work, even for Captured Tracks, and the band’s sound seamlessly slotted straight in with the lofi pop aesthetic of the label (bands like Dum Dum Girls and The German Measles are typical releases). “There is such a specific group of people that are involved with Captured Tracks it would have been hard to avoid working with them,” explains Patrick, a release sounding inevitable.

“I think they put out some really good records and are really into it so you can’t help but be enthusiastic,” adds an excited Roxanne. “He [Sniper] is also really into the artwork which is great.”

“I wanted us to recreate the Sgt Pepper album with Hitler in it,” deadpans James. “Maybe we could all wear Nazi uniforms!”

Roxanne (above giggles from her band): “I quite like it when

bands have a similar look to all their records, it’s great when you can instantly recognize a band by their cover.”

The end result of this MySpace-mutual-appreciationambush: an EP entitled ‘Found Love in a Graveyard’; a love letter to a ghostly apparition; and a lament of a broken heart.

“Sometimes I can over romanticise a lot of things,” explains Roxanne, while Patrick has another take on the EP and the band’s material. “The song’s about making the most of a dark situation, seeing the good in a pretty bad scenario.

“I’m really into the lyrics people write when they have gone mad,” he continues “like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson. When they write crazy lyrics about demons, there is a lot of creativity in that.”

Unfortunately, Roxanne falls short of a lazy-eyed wild stare, preferring to share a joke with the others. If there is an underbelly to Veronica Falls it’s likely to be full of beer and lying around in the sun. As dusk descends, talk drifts to drinking dens and the band rush into the Fun Fair, perhaps to find love on the ghost-train, although probably just to have a good time.

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the pains of being pure at heart /

wistful pop shoegazers, NYC sweethearts and the undeniable surprise success Story of the year P h o t o g r a p h e r : pav l a ko p e c n a Wr i t e r : s i m o n g r ay

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Hot Dogs. Instantly synonymous with NYC, for sure. But if one was to imagine The Pastels, back in the late 1980’s, had stopped Geordie pop visionary Paddy McAloon – the brains, brawn, and more recently, the beard behind Prefab Sprout – in the street, and said, “Seriously Patrick, stop going on about said sausage snacks, jumping frogs, and towns in New Mexico, and eat this!”, and promptly rammed a Boss Hyper-Fuzz pedal, wrapped in Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan into his agape oral cavity, we’d be on the way to the conception of another of New York’s gifts to

the world.

“Sure, I love hot dogs, but I really like lamb doner’s. I try to get one whenever we’re in Europe. They’re just as good as anything back home”, proclaims a masticating Alex, TPOBPAH’s erudite bass player, as the flames of the age old debate of ‘Highest echelons of ‘British/ European cuisine Vs American acts of culinary brilliance’ are ignited.

Indeed, one would surmise that lately Alex would have had his pick of European fodder of which to extol the virtues.

Already 5 dates into a European

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“We’d rather err on the side of being ridiculous and fall on our face than not stand for something” G u i ta r i s t and s i n g e r K i p

tour which so far has seen them conquer the Paredes De Coura festival in Portugal, as well as Scandinavia, the band, who are fast making a mark which may require medical attention on the twee/indie-pop universe, with their slightly shoegazey, melancholic, muddy-but-muchlymelodic brand are in fine fettle.

Explains singer/guitarist Kip: “The reaction of people on this tour has been overwhelmingly positive. I don’t want to jinx us, but every time we come over, we’re having more fun, and playing bigger venues. I don’t know if that trend will reverse again, but tonight is the biggest show we’ve played in England. It was great going back to Sweden again – it was the first place we played outside of the US, long before the album came out. It was magical.”

Support of their imminent 4song EP, ‘Higher than the stars’, is what brings them across the Atlantic. With the first two tracks, (the title track and ‘Falling Over’) particularly reaching new highs of wistful, tune-gushing symphony, we hear voices that seem to copulate, inter-twining like lovers’ legs, uniting in a moment of celestial harmony, and then lying together in a state of total blissful synergy and eternal mutual understanding.

Just try getting them out of your head! As well as The Pastels, there are subtle tributes paid up to My Bloody Valentine, Belle and Sebastian, The Vaselines and Teenage Fanclub.

It was a solid and binding case of Scotophilia that drew the NY four-piece together in the first place, in the distant past of 2006. “Music was

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definitely a big part of why and how we became friends,” Peggy musters. “We’d go see shows. I guess we just sort of bonded”.

Continues Kip: “There are definitely overlaps in what we like, but there’s also a healthy level of polarity and disparity there.”

Bond they did. Not long after Kip, Peggy, Alex and drummer Kurt had formed the band, there were the early releases of ‘This love is Fucking Right!’ and a self-titled EP, released on Painbow in 2007. Next came the split single with The Parallelograms (‘Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan’) before their debut album earlier this year on the persistent Fortuna Pop label.

One cannot refute the presence of the spirit of Mr Cobain, echoing with hook-laden resonance, throughout TPOBPAH’s songwriting – “I first heard of The Vaselines through Kurt Cobain championing them,” recalls Kip. “I feel that I would never have started along this road if it wasn’t for Kurt Cobain – you know when you’re 14 and you still think Lenny Kravitz is cool? No, no, no! – if you were really into music, you would be listening to The Vaselines. Kurt Cobain was great at writing pop melodies, and melding them against a noisy and abrasive sound. It made us want to push a little further, and while I wouldn’t say we do it that way, we like the idea of pushing pop outside of the traditional ‘pretty song’ format. When a song is a bit off, it makes it sound more emotionally intense.”

Kip continues: “In terms of our lyrics, I guess we draw on personal experience. ‘Young Adult Fiction’ (from the album)

is about, err, physical expressions of love in a library – I can’t say too much more – I was really tired in an interview once, and I said the f-word, talking about ‘This Love is Fucking Right’, my grandma saw it, she called up, and I had some explaining to do.” Kip smiles. “‘Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan’ is also about doing it in a library, actually!

“The reason the songs sound the way they do is because everyone contributes to them.

There might be a slightly tragic-comic aspect to them, almost overly idealised versions of reality. We were never one of those bands that wanted to ride a wave to the top. It doesn’t matter if only a few people like it, but if they like it a lot, then that’s very powerful. We’d rather err on the side of being ridiculous and fall on our face than not stand for something.

There was a band from NY called My Favourite who were kind of out of place and out of time, but they had very strong views on songwriting, and we’re like that.”

The bands curious name comes from a suitably intriguing source – as Kip unfurls: “When I was living in Portland, Oregon, a friend wrote an unpublished children’s story called ‘The Pains of Being Pure At Heart.’ I guess the moral of the story was that the time you spend with your friends, having fun and travelling is more important than things like worldly ambition or rank... I know that makes us sound like The Monkees, but I think it’s a really fitting representation of who we are. I couldn’t imagine being in a band that wasn’t like that. If you heard our music and the band

name, it would kind of make sense. Plus it’s a really beautiful sentiment, and is open to interpretation as well. Our other name is Stabby Time!”

Frankly terrifying band alter egos aside, do TPOBPAH suffer from, well, cardiac piety, and if so, does it carry some level of discomfort with it, vented through their chosen profession?

Peggy laments. “I had to give up my dog,” she says “because I was touring so much –That was painful. I think he was sick of being in my cramped apartment.

It’s actually a happy story though, because Lammy is now with my parents in New Orleans, and it’s cool because now they have a dog.”

After taking a brief respite to ponder the horrors of C.S.A (Canine Separation Anxiety.

Honestly!), and with the word on TPOBPAH now spreading throughout Europe like swine flu on anabolics, how are things back home?

Kip: “We played on the Carson Daly show recently – It really was one of those moments where you have to stop and say, ‘Is this actually happening?’ - We were in LA, on a sound stage, with Jay Leno in the next studio…it was amazing. And we have a huge US tour in the fall.

All that’s left now is to meet the Queen!”

After discussions are had on the viability of being able to arrange a chill-out with Her Maj, TPOBPAH depart with gusto, to play to a packed Islington Garage – a set which is so shudderingly exquisite, it makes the hairs on the back of my back stand up. Leaving the pondering of just one point – are there any libraries open late round here?

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nod z z z /

Having released a no-fi album that’s 19 minutes long, cali trio nodzzz had all the excuses they needed to start touring the world P h o t o g r a p h e r : O w e n r i c h a r d s Wr i t e r : p o l ly r a p pa p o r t

“It was a good excuse for a road trip,” muses Sean Paul.

“It kind of provided the basis for all subsequent decisions,” adds Anthony, “Part impulse and part…“ “Travel?” offers Sean Paul, “Stupidity,” Anthony grins, decisively.

Lo-fi garage trio Nodzzz have never been to London before.

They’ve only just recovered from their first proper full English breakfast, and the UK is quite a leap from their first venture out of San Francisco in the summer of 2007. On that particular occasion, the three took in a road trip tour of the East Coast. This is where Anthony’s idea of ‘stupidity’ comes in.

Having only formed in October of 2006, the band weren’t well known outside of California, meaning their mission to the East relied exclusively on friends living that side of the country, not only to provide crashes but to help set up the shows and get audiences for them by inviting all of their friends. A risky career move, but the band felt they gained a bit of respect for sticking their musical necks out so boldly and they managed to expand their fan-base along the way, so: a good excuse for a road trip indeed.

A couple of years, a few mix tapes and a short, sharp, noshit album later and Nodzzz are at it again, this time stretching their necks all the way to Europe, London being the start of their tour. In keeping with tradition, they’re crashing with friends (our very own Male Bonding) and, as before, if on a larger/stranger scale, they’ll be throwing themselves in with the natives, playing with different local bands in each city they hit. The guys are looking forward to seeing what music scenes they’ll find

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themselves in. Back home, Nodzzz are slotted into the general category of Lo-fi and that’s where the pigeon holing tends to stop. Unlike most London artists, they don’t find themselves lazily associated with the same handful of bands on a regular basis. “Right now, what’s operating in San Francisco is a network of friends,” says Sean Paul, who, incidentally, is not that pelvic-winding, dancehall namesake… obviously. “Bands we share practice space with are the bands we probably feel the most akin to and it just so happens that we all might sound complimentary on a mix tape together.”

“We could self-aggrandise and say, ‘Oh, we’re so disconnected [from other bands]’ but what our music really feels disconnected from is all the other shit that gets written about,” adds Anthony, pausing to check his band mates’ reactions. “Or maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know.”

“I’ve definitely seen San Francisco bands all lumped into one category before,” confirms Sean Paul “but that’s bad lumping, just saying we’re all from California.”

Admittedly, there is a certain vibe that infuses a great deal of California based music, and even Nodzzz’s cerebral, frank DIY has a laid back, sun-bleached brightness to its otherwise unpolished surface. Perhaps it’s a surf, sun and sand thing. “I grew up in southern California and it was very much about the beach and skateboarding,” admits drummer Eric. “That’s what I did. Then, driving up from Los Angeles to San Francisco every month for shows, you saw how connected that city was in terms of social events and shows and how disconnected Los Angeles was because it’s so big – I wanted

something more community-based so I moved to San Francisco.”

“You can get sick of the reality of a community though, because it’s so small,” counters Anthony. “You can hit seven record stores within, like, five miles…” “… And see about eight people you know,” Eric agrees “which could be a bad thing if you want to be alone, but it’s a nice thing, for the most part.”

They compare the city’s music community to an idyllic fantasyland where every night there’s something on, somewhere to be, and at every turn there’s a familiar face, friendly or otherwise. “It’s like a Never Never Land soap opera,” they laugh, “Where everyone knows what Snow White is really up to and the seven dwarves have started a new band…” Isn’t Never Never Land Peter Pan’s territory? “See, I’m lumping the categories together.” Sean Paul holds up his hands. “That whole Disney Scene, you know?”

‘In The City (Contact High)’, a track off Nodzzz’s eponymous LP, gives a view of that claustrophobic, competitive side of San Francisco: In the city they have something to prove/ But nowhere to move /If you’ve got no talent, then beat it buddy/ Just stand there looking cool.

But the other side of that closeness of quarters is the communal aspect that drew Eric away from LA. “What makes the city unique is the diversity and how supportive people are,” he explains. “There might be a four band show where we’re all friends but sound completely different – and yet everyone is there for all the bands.”

This mixing and matching, along with shared rehearsal rooms, has led to the emergence in San Francisco of a volume of unique musical styles, as bands

subconsciously take influence from other bands. Nodzzz style, however, sounds attuned to more vintage artists: Anthony’s vocals have been compared to those of Mark E Smith and references to Dead Milkmen are rarely far behind. The band readily admits that the latter are an influence but Sean Paul tilts his head matter-of-factly.

“Our influences – our intended influences – never actually make their way into our music,” he says.

Sean is into the Byrds and, after growing up on punk, he’s developed a fascination with the

05 Grateful Dead. Anthony was raised on the Velvet Underground and was bitten two years ago by the Bob Dylan bug – “I now hear pop music through his ears,” he explains. “His aesthetics and shifting artistic stances… yeah.

I have to deal with that.” Eric claims to listen to the new Cock Sparrer album every ten minutes and his go-to band is Texans Big Boys, and all three seem to have a mild obsession with Felt.

(It’s about admiration with minimal emulation…)

These retro influences put an interesting slant on more recent pop music, something Eric tries

“In san francisco You can hit seven record stores within five miles and see about eight people you know”

to include in his interests and Anthony is more than a little cynical about: “I used to get stuck in a rut about how halfbaked music is at this point in time, like it isn’t being taken as seriously,” he frowns “but then I realise how lucky I am to have such a wealth of musical history to go through.” And besides, there are bands, like Nodzzz, who take what they do very seriously and make their music their own. DIY, after all, isn’t just an aesthetic. They mention another favourite band Mayyors, from Sacramento, who are so intent on keeping things

in-house that they don’t even have a MySpace. Nodzzz are less hardcore, more “liberated by circumstances”, having few obligations and being part of a mutual support system of likeminded musicians. Their punchy, ninety-two second tracks and homemade audio cassettes aren’t a marketing scheme, they’re just how Nodzzz work: simple, honest and real, and a bit off-thecuff, like the band’s touring habits. Twenty gigs round Europe then back to London to crash with Male Bonding? A good excuse for a road trip, indeed.

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06

cold pu mas /

over and over, this experimental trio make looping kraut jams that rarely sound predictable, unimaginaive or quite like anything else P h o t o g r a p h e r : O w e n r i c h a r d s Wr i t e r : s t u a r t s t u bb s

There are uglier words, but ‘repetitive’ is winning no beauty pageants either. For the most part, it belongs in the mutt pen with like-minds ‘slovenliness’, ‘inept’ and ‘poor planning’. No one ever says, “You’re going to love John, he’s so repetitive” or “I had a lovely chat with your sister the other day, it was really repetitive.” No, repetition is hard house and prison. It’s mindless and simple, like an isolated section of a factory line. Its end can never come soon enough, if only it would. In short, to be ‘repetitive’ is to be bori…zzzz [dribble].

With that in mind, Cold Pumas need another word to describe their music. Because while their relentless grooves bound forward, over and over, boring it ain’t. Like a stuck needle on an Abe Vigoda record, there’s beauty in this trio’s harsh, looping jams.

“I think the repetition thing just came from zoning out when playing something over and over and over again, that is what’s to blame,” reasons guitarist Dan Reeves. “We want people to go from liking something, to thinking ‘why are they still playing this?’, to then start zoning out with us. We all love it when you lock into a rhythm or pattern when you’re watching a band play, we want people to be excited and focused on stuff like that when they watch us.

Also, that moment when you change a chord after ages of repetition, or drop in a sad bass note or the snare finally comes in – that’s the moment we’re always going towards.” Dan pauses. “That sounds like

bullshit, doesn’t it? We’re into repetition because we’re lazy.

And, although we LOVE repetition, we do also love songs, so hopefully there are some actual tunes in there and it’s not just three dudes infinitely jamming at each other.”

Three dudes jamming at each other it most definitely is.

Live, Dan, bassist Oliver and drummer Patrick hypnotise each other, locking in mathy riffs, almost oblivious to onlookers.

But to be an onlooker is a fascinating thrill, and in case you’re wondering Cold Pumas do also carry the tunes they hope for. New single ‘Altered Yeast’ is abrasively unapologetic from the off (no ambient, building intro to this kraut assault), but it’s never mindless. Sad bass notes do subtlety drop in, endless repetition does cease for a greater effect. And when you think you’ve worked the song out, just as repetition is looking like an ugly word again, HEALTH-esque zombie vocals arrive that you can’t make out.

It’s far from predictable and derivative.

For Cold Pumas, making this danceable, aggressive music began in Exeter under a different name. Oh Hell No was a “more krauty” project; “a strictly-party-dance band” that played at friends’ house parties. “Cold Pumas started as a continuation of the ideas of Oh Hell No,” explains Dan “but soon found its own sound. We wanted to do something that was a bit darker but still very rhythmic and repetitious. It took us about a year of rehearsing before we were happy with the stuff we were writing.”

That year began in Brighton, where the band relocated to and are still based. Their new hometown is, as described by Patrick, “a funny place.”

“There’re a million bands in Brighton,” he begins “which gives the perception (it did for me anyhow when I moved here) that there’s a definite scene that is all encompassing, but there isn’t. There’re just lots of awful local bands constantly featured on the front of glossy local listings magazines who are supporting MOR indie outfits and playing terrible chillout festivals. There’re also a million venues too, but so many are terrible.”

“Brighton really lacks a place like The Cavern in Exeter,” continues Oliver, remembering where the band first met “which is a kind of central ‘hub’, for want of a better word, where pretty much all of the non-bland youth of Exeter go, and so you naturally end up meeting people who share your interests. Without The Cavern, Exeter, for me, would be devoid of anything interesting. The equivalent in Brighton are Sex is Disgusting shows, so hurrah for them.”

Sex Is Disgusting being the Teen Sheikhs-affiliated record label, Patrick and Dan agree with Oliver most strongly on three points; that Sex Is Disgusting throw the best parties in Brighton, that amongst the terrible chillout festival bands in the local areas there is also a handful of the most exciting bands in the country right now (La La Vaquez, Peepholes, Teen Sheikhs, The Sticks), and that Sonic Youth are their one collective

influence.

“They’re the only bands we all like unconditionally,” nods Dan. “We take influences from different parts of different bands and sounds. Personally, I want our guitars to sound like Ex Models, our rhythms to ape ESG, !!!, Can and Gang Gang Dance, and our vocals to sound like The Beach Boys and Fly Pan Am.” “There are two defining moments for me,” adds Oliver.

“Seeing Ex Models play with Kid Millions drumming was the most mesmerising show I’ve ever been to. We were all pretty much in a trance by the end and it made me realise there was no need to be afraid of repetition, that it could be beautiful. And then the first time I heard Abe Vigoda, the sheer vitality and exuberance as well as a kind of frantic longing optimism to their music excited me more than any band has for ages.”

Fly Pan Am being the once experimental side project connected to post-rock collective God Speed You! Black Emperor, and Ex Models the avant-garde Brooklyn quartet responsible for 2001’s continually challenging ‘Other Mathematics’, these aren’t your usual points of reference. But Cold Pumas aren’t your usual band. Not unlike Sonic Youth, many different genres and ideas leap from their music. Krauty guitars, dance beats, math rock arpeggios, close vocal harmonies, experimental swathes of sound with unknown origins – they’re all in there somewhere, fighting to get out, over and over and over and over. Just wait ‘til you hear it – repetition has never sounded so good.

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tR A T sH AlK N IG As Erol Alkan finally releases a single under his own name, the man who changed indie clubbing forever still refuses to welcome celebrity over his compulsion to create P h o t o g r a p h e r : P h i l s h a r p Wr i t e r : d e a n d r i s c o l l

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T he man who keeps kids dancing is showing me his favourite toys. “There’s only 100 of these in the world,” he says, flicking to the next picture of a rare vintage synth on his iPhone. “I bought two, and gave the other one to Soulwax”. It’s clear Erol Alkan was raised to share and share alike - it’s that youthful enthusiasm that has earned him lots of friends to play and share his toys with.

And that enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed since he started sneaking out of his parent’s house to DJ at clubs as a teenager, nor has it diminished over the course of ten years of his Trash club night. It’s what’s seen him produce albums by the Long Blondes, Mystery Jets and Late of the Pier, be named the world’s best DJ by the world’s leading dance magazine, and found his own label, Phantasy Records. As the t-shirt says, ‘E.R.O.L. keeps kids dancing’ – and that compulsion to do so remains intact, despite the plaudits and myriad offers to sell-out that will (and have) come his way.

Paul Van Dyk, Erol Alkan, Armin Van Buuren,Tiesto – it’s not hard to spot the odd one out.The list of winners of Mixmag’s DJ of the Year award mostly testifies to the enduring global appeal of stadium trance, except for in 2006 when the DJ in charge of indie’s most exciting club night took the accolade. Despite all of the above being amongst the most in-demand DJs in the world, there’s very little common ground between them.Whilst the kings of trance play ever-bigger shows and release track after track of the same cookie-cutter productions, Alkan is busy getting DJ bookings under his new Disco 3000 guise: a shift away from the indie-electro that he has become synonymous with, to share his love for the strains of – as he puts it – dance music’s DNA: disco, italo, old school house and funk-influenced sounds from 30+ years of

kids dancing.

It’s not what DJs are supposed to do when they hit the big time. Right now Erol should be headlining his own Trash festivals, playing the same Soulwax remixes and Tiga bangers that made Trash one of the world’s most talked about club nights. He should be raking in massive amounts of money for producing the next Killers album, or churning out remixes for the likes of Girls Aloud and Mika. After all, Alkan is a big fan of Girls Aloud. So why has he decided to take a break from producing bands immediately after helping make one of the decade’s most brilliant indie albums? Why is he not churning out the remixes and instead deciding to collaborate with his friend Alex Ridha (aka Boys Noize) to release a double A-side single which doesn’t even have guest vocals from Jamie T? Let’s start with the new single – ‘Death Suite/Waves’: two very different tracks that Alkan and Sidha originally conceived as DJ battle weapons for their sets, until the reaction from DJ’s they passed the track to convinced them to release them on Sidha’s Boys Noize Records. Despite the success the two artists have achieved, neither track is a big electro anthem for the masses. ‘Waves’ is a Balearic-tinged effort that will fit snugly into the sets of any number of nu-disco DJ’s, while ‘Death Suite’ is uncompromising, almost disorientating, techno. Neither track features vocals, or samples or huge hands in the air breakdowns. It’s not what many expected Alkan to do next, so how did it come about?

“I’ve known of Alex for a long time, since he was Kid Alex when he was making strange pop music,” explains Erol, putting the iPhone down. “I was obviously aware of him morphing from Kid Alex into Boys Noize, and through picking up the records he was

accommodated. But with Alex it’s totally putting out and sending me. It’s like with any natural - it’s actually having fun, there’s of the friendships that I’ve had with people certainly no ego.That’s why it wasn’t ‘Erol in this scene that I’m a part of – first you Alkan vs Boyz Noize’ – I really hate the become a fan of their music, then a whole notion of it being a ‘versus’ thing, of friendship develops, and from there it just ‘battling’. It was all just very natural – we turns into whatever it is when you’re in sync made ‘Death Suite’ in 4 hours. And in that with people. I was one of the first to book time the computer had crashed and we’d lost Boys Noize in the UK, when I did a party at everything and we had to go back and Bugged Out! where I programmed the linerebuild it! ‘Waves’ took a bit longer ‘cos it up.The next day he came round to my kept changing so much. I think there were house, we hung out and he played me a load about 22 different drafts to it; we wanted to of his album he was making, and an early do something that was more sublime than version of his Feist remix. “ people would expect.”

“It was about a year and a half ago, Alex said that he was going to be in London and did I want make some music and see what happens? You always kind of agree to these things to work with other producers, but the ission accomplished, there. As the great thing about duos is that there’s usually man that allowed Late of The Pier to reach one person who is an ideas person and one the cosmic heights they were stretching for, person who is technical. Not to blow our ask anyone what they’d expected Alkan’s first own trumpets but in ourselves me and Alex double ‘A’ side to sound like and most would are both those two people in a sense – the have said words to the effect of, “A good dynamic of being a solo artist is knowing Filthy Dukes”, which translates as a what you’re gonna do and how you’re gonna commercially viable indie/dance hit from do it.When you’ve got two people in a room Radio 1. Clearly, neither ‘Waves’ nor ‘Death who do both things, both constantly fighting Suite’ are that (Zane Lowe has played the over the keyboard or computer trying to lay former on his show but it’s certainly not for a part down, it’s quite a fragile environment Fearne & Reggie’s audience), and there’s - it’s one that you have to accommodate the more to come. other person as much as you want to be “We’ve got about 10 unfinished tracks that we’re working on together,” confirms Erol. “I think it’s only fair when you work in that collaborative sense that there are two people in the room when you finish it.That whole thing of doing a mix and sending it to the other person, them checking it and writing notes and stuff, that takes ages.The one thing I want to do when I make records is have two very distinctly different pieces of music on either side. If ‘Waves’ or ‘Death Suite’ had come out on their own, I would

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“if I just sat about and listened to dance music all day, I’d lose a bit of my soul”

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“DJing is a constant challenge. The moment you rest on your laurels, it’s over”

have felt it wasn’t complete without something juxtaposed to it. If people think ‘Why’s he making such hard music?’, on the other side there’s something that’s still very soft. It’s the same thing I did with the Bugged Out! / Bugged In! CD – It couldn’t be two bangers, or two Balearic tracks, I need to have the other side to express myself.

“At any one given time there’s a lot of amazing music out there, but for the kind of stuff that we were playing or wanting to play, there hasn’t been that much. At the same time, there’s some incredible stuff happening in the dubstep and dancehall side of things; you can hear really inventive great records out there. But I’m never gonna turn into a dubstep DJ overnight, so if there’s a hole in your set then make the records to fill that hole.That’s how it began, we were playing them and people were asking what they were.Whatever it is, it kind of fits but it’s still quite out of step. ‘Death Suite’ is extremely uncompromising, but it’s not relentless and mindless.There’s a lot in there – it’s almost like a sheep in wolf ’s clothing.”

A

mong the fans of the single have been the Chemical Brothers, for whom ‘Death Suite’ has been a big track in recent DJ sets, and in many ways is reminiscent of some of Tom & Ed’s own Electronic Battle Weapons. As a multi-million selling dance act, they made their name with music that was, on the surface, quite in your face, but there was a lot of subtleties to it – perhaps that’s why they’ve been big fans of the track?

“The reason Chemical Brothers (and Daft Punk) have had the success they’ve had is through their subtlety, their detail – it’s not mindless. Not to dismiss the current scene, but there is stuff that has got a bit too hard and a bit too mindless – if we’re not careful we’re only a few steps from Hard House or stuff like that. Let’s bring some funk back, let’s not just bang our heads on walls!”

Does that tie into doing Disco 3000 sets (of which Erol has just put out a podcast on

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dance website Resident Advisor)? Is that a deliberate attempt to bring some funk back to the scene?

“My love of disco runs right back into my childhood,” says Erol without need for a pause. “I’ve been collecting those records for a long time. It wasn’t just to get that swing and that funk back into people’s ears – that was part of it, but that was also aimed at the people who visit my website and forum and stuff, to illustrate that the music that they love now, the music of the Ed Banger scene and what we’re all inspired by, much of its roots lay in that end of disco music; not disco as such, but that strange, dark, satanic club music. It’s something people can listen to and pinpoint inspirations for stuff they like now. I do feel that as a DJ it’s kind of my job. If all these people are willing to listen to what you’ve got to say, instead of just playing all the latest tracks in a DJ set, challenge them a little bit. ‘Check this music out, this isn’t what you might normally listen to but it’s great music that we’re all inspired by’. It’s exciting for me not to keep doing the same thing over and over again. I feel that if I just sat about and listened to dance music all day, I’d lose a bit of my soul. I can’t exist just doing what 85 of the top 100 DJ’s do every week.

“I do feel DJing is a constant challenge.

The moment you rest on your laurels, it’s over. I have to keep challenging myself in what I do. Even to the point when you’re gonna end up pissing off your fanbase a little bit. I genuinely need to put forward what I find exciting; I don’t think your audience should limit you.When Mixmag named me Best DJ in the World, I was chuffed! But what do you do? You don’t go and produce a Mystery Jets album after that, you get a manager and you set up a massive tour around the world for the next 18 months... I went and made a Mystery Jets album.That’s me though, that was fun! They’d ask me what it was like to be the ‘Best DJ in the World’, and I’m playing the acoustic guitar trying to work out a part! All my favourite people haven’t done just one thing.The people who I look up to as DJ’s, someone

like Andy Weatherall; I love the fact he’s going out playing rock’n’roll records to 50 people in the back room of some place - it’s inspiring.We’re slaves to the music we love.

There’s always that element where people are standing there waiting for you to do something – I’ve come from a background of indie clubs, where now you’d be lucky to get out of there without getting beaten up for not playing a certain request! One of the driving forces behind Trash was for people to accept alternative clubbing in the same vein as they did in the dance clubs. Back then when you looked through the pages of the NME you looked at the club guide and it was all dance clubs, but Trash was embracing all different kinds of music, and being something that encouraged people to treat Monday night like a Saturday night.”

Once again, Erol has ignored what’s expected of him. Before, he chose producing Mystery Jets over living up to his DJ award, now, after his third album as producer (on Late of the Pier’s brilliant ‘Fantasy Black Channel’), he is apparently reluctant to take on another.Was there a feeling of not being able to top that record?

“It was more a case of having said everything I’d wanted to say right now as a producer – I wanted to get back to my own stuff and make the music I want to make and DJing. I didn’t want to step onto a treadmill with production. I was getting a lot of offers to work with similar bands, but I wanted to

“In INDIE CLUBs now you’d be lucky to get out of there without getting beaten up for not playing a certain request”

create other opportunities for myself. Maybe in 5 years time I’ll want to do more production, when I can learn again. It was a great adventure, but by the end of the Late of the Pier album I felt like ‘OK, I know what I’m doing now’. But when I get that feeling I feel like I want to unravel something else.

It’s like when I was remixing, they’d always sound different – no two remixes back-toback sound the same, ‘cos I was always trying to find something new to explore. I’m just trying not to bore myself.”

Being given such high profile remixes when you were still quite inexperienced at production, was that kind of like growing up in public?

“Totally. I was always thinking ‘what’s the strangest thing that could happen in this track right now?’ And then integrate that into it.”

In its own way, that’s what sums up Erol Alkan’s career path – he could just play the game, but why do that when you can have much more fun pulling the rug from under people’s feet and do the opposite of what a big name DJ is supposed to. He cites outsider music, by the likes of Daniel Johnston, as a big influence – artists who aren’t technically proficient musically but can make some of the strangest, most beautiful music through their sheer compulsion to do it in the way that makes sense to them.This might explain why, instead of signing the next Boys Noize to his Phantasy label, he’s signing a Brazilian bedroom artist by the name of Babe,Terror who makes ethereal electronic music solely from distorted recordings of his own voice.

He continues to push his Disco 3000 project, with the aforementioned Resident Advisor podcast, and as well as a Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve debut album, he’s working on a couple more tracks with Late of the Pier’s new single in mind – including a new track so mental it apparently makes previous single ‘Focker’ sound like a wet ballad by Snow Patrol.

Who knows what he’ll end up doing after all that: E.R.O.L. Keeps kids on their toes.

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re Oct vi 09 ews Al bums 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

A Place To Bury Strangers Atlas Sounds Big Boss Man Cymbals Eat Guitars Fuck Buttons Hudson Mohawke Kid Harpoon Maps Mumford & Sons Nite Jewel Olafur Arnalds Part Chip The Big Pink The Drums The Twilight Sad Times New Viking Vitalic Vivian Girls Wolfmother

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Bad For Lazarus Cate Le Bon Die! Die! Die! Golden Animals HEALTH Her Name Is Calla Magazine Major Lazer Offset Festival She Keeps Bees The Dodos Thee Vicars Three Trapped Tigers Wave Machines Wood Shjips

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Times New Viking Born Again Revisited (4AD)

By Nathan Westley. In stores Sept 21

08/10

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Charles Darwin once noted that species have one main choice in life: Evolve or die.

It’s a statement that shares parallels with many of today’s musicians; release a follow up album much like the previous, and expect its release to pass with a few snide comments and a general shrug of the shoulders before your band’s life ends up in a similar way to the Triceratops.

Chances are Times New Viking were not aware of Darwin’s thoughts, if they had then maybe the recording sessions for this, the follow up album to 2008’s much acclaimed ‘Rip It Off ’, might have dramatically changed, with the band instead popping out a clean, high end polished product be-rift of character and substance.

As the album title suggests ‘Born Again Revisited’ does not herald some magical rebirth for the trio; they have firmly stuck to their guns,

remained fixed to their original DIY ethos and fashioned a solid, well constructed follow-up album – one where they have sternly kept hands on a Lo-fi recording philosophy.

Clean of cheap time-dating hi-tech thrills, it is very much a return to old familiar stomping ground, both musically and production wise.

The Guided By Voices-esque opener, ‘Martin Luther King Day’, proves to be one of the albums most instantly accessible songs, offering the listener a firm reminder of the heights Times New Viking can reach when they are in full flow. Delve further in and Pavement could be used as an equally justifiable reference point as the band also embrace a slightly more noise filled abrasive direction to counter act their underlying and often deeply buried pop sensibilities. ‘City on Drugs’ sees them clinch shouted off kilter boy/girl vocals and pitch them against a chiming repetitive organ riff and driven fuzzed guitar, a formula that is tweaked and reapplied several times throughout the album’s 15-track course.

In a time where instant, hard hitting appeal

is cherished, and everything that seems either a little too complex or difficult is quickly glanced over,Times New Viking have fathomed an album where the only main stumbling block is the raw production in which it’s caked in. Even though they may boast of this album as having a “25% higher fidelity” rate than the previous, it still takes several listens for the magnitude of depth to firmly settle in, the listener having to battle through repeated plays, unearthing the songs layer by layer before the albums undeniable beauty can be fully uncovered and embraced. It is a quest well worth the endurance but may be a move that only helps rubber stamp Times New Viking as a band that look set to further nurture a cult underground following.

Whether Times New Viking will surprise us in the future and come back with a stark new direction or whether they are locked into repeating the past over and over again in some crazed Groundhog Day like manner remains to be seen; some will always argue that evolution only happens when there is a need to improve.

08/10

09/10

09/10

07/10

08/10

Vivian Girls

The Big Pink

Hudson Mohawke

Part Chimp

Cymbals Eat Guitars

Everything Goes Wrong

A Brief History of Love

Butter

Thriller

Why There Are Mountains

(In The Red)

By Polly Rappaport. In stores Sept 21

(4AD)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores now

(Warp)

By Reef Younis. In stores Oct 12

(Rock Action)

By Danny Canter. In stores Sept 21

(Memphis Industries)

By Sam Walton. In stores Oct 26

Following an ultimately break-up preceding debut,Vivian Girls have returned with a new line-up and a new album – which is also a breakup record of a different sort.

Whereas before,Vivian Girls brightly thrashed out the work of a band about to fall to bits, ‘Everything Goes Wrong’ sifts through the complex emotional debris of those pieces. It retains the Girls’ trademark reverb and sublime Shangri-La’s harmonies but the overall tone is a few shades darker, from half-hearted, crestfallen vocals on ‘Can’t Get Over You’, through to the lingering haze of dejectedness on rare, urgent tracks like ‘The Desert’. Far from going limp or anaemic, however, the album swells with cranked up bass and crunchy, expressive guitar – the effect is moody and magnetic. Everything may have gone wrong, but this record sounds very right.

As everybody’s tip for stardom for the coming months, London based duo The Big Pink have much to deliver to match the hyperbole.

Every pundit expects them to be big, and without selling a record they’ve succeeded in one regard, as every track on their debut sounds absolutely enormous. Marrying, with great fluency, the cold, industrial stomp of Nine Inch Nails and Autolux with warmth, stirred from classic My Bloody Valentine, this debut is a complete (sad) joy. Lead off single ‘Dominos’ is the most arms in the air of the duo’s choruses, but each track is hooky in its own right – in particular ‘Velvet’ and former limited single ‘Too Young To Love’.

Crushing crescendos and rising soundscapes go hand in hand throughout and your attention span never drops. For once, the hypesters really have got it absolutely right.

When the Mars Volta and Busy P are casually dropping your name into conversation, you clearly know a little bit about experimentation. And almost a decade on from his bow at the DMC finals as a14-year old, Hudson Mowhawke has churned up something so smooth, it melts.

‘Butter’ is an LP made to ease away Sunday hangovers - a compelling mix of syrupy R’n’B beats, guest vocal collaborations and dreamy interludes, all underpinned by a precocious take on pop production. Determinedly experimental, where tracks like ‘Star Crackout’ crackle with exploratory splendour, ‘Joy Fantastic’ carries all the buoyant appeal of Outkast, easing you back into familiar accessible territory.

Delve a little deeper and the UNKLE drum pummel of ‘Gluetooth’ and heavy, languid thud of ‘FUSE’ confirms Hudson’s mellow genius.

In these troubled post-MJ times, the shear audacity of naming your third album ‘Thriller’ is almost as unbelievable as Part Chimp’s latest is bludgeoning. Sounding like it’ll blow your speakers regardless of its volume, it’s a record that’s impossible to be listened to quietly, and yet there’s something soothing about the tar-thick grunge riffs and sonic walls of sound that make up tracks like ‘Dirty Sun’. Maybe it’s the euphoric raising scales, or the idea that a post-Sonic Youth Led Zeppelin could sound this experimental if they kissed and made up. Regardless of reason, ‘Thriller’ manages to do for noise rock what post-punk did for punk.

It’s no longer about atonal sounds pitching originality above meaning - now bands like Part Chimp can say far more than “Fuck You!”.

Sure, it’s set to one volume, which can become samey, but still, Michael would be proud.

Remember when the Strokes debut arrived fully formed; sounding like it just fell out of Julian Casablancas’ head in one natural pouring motion? Well, if you don’t, it was like the sensation you’ll get when you hear this: so effortless and well-rounded is this record it’s difficult to believe it’s a debut. ‘...And the Hazy Sea’ kicks off veering wildly between cataclysmic guitar blowout and Rhodes-driven eye-of-the-storm calm, like a kind of post-rock Pavement, offering an early indication to the sheer number of ideas floating around here.The changes in direction then continue apace, taking in tightly coiled postpunk, shoegaze and horn-driven indie pop, before a tepid and overlong closing number slightly spoils the fun. It’s a minor blip, as WTAM is a natural-sounding, sophisticated record that seriously repays repeated listening.

Nite Jewel Good Evening (No Pain In Pop)

By Reef Younis. In stores Sept 28

05/10

Championed by Italians Do It Better big cheese Johnny Jewel, Nite Jewel - aka Californian Romana Gonzalez (and, more recently, sometimes Emily Jane and others) - seems to have been taken in as the celebrated DJ’s lo-fi little sister. An album of eighttrack bedroom ambience, debut album ‘Good Evening’ then, serves as an intriguing prospect. Balanced synth plods in the shadow of an omnipotent electronic pulse, as Romana’s anomalous vocal floats over 16 bit mega drive flashes. Carrying the cold, withdrawn mordancy of the 80’s, its often haunting exterior is tempered with a healthy sense of DIY analogue beats. But for all the shimmering playfulness of tracks like ‘Let’s Go (The Two of Us Together)’, the tired LA lounge of the closing ‘Lover’ highlights the albums Achilles heel, not least because it resembles a Culture Club cast off.

Pedestrian in places, ‘Good Evening’ is the aloof girl (or boy) in the club.You desperately want to approach them, you just don’t know how. www.loudandquiet.com

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07/10

06/10

07/10

08/10

The Drums Summertime

Atlas Sound

Kid Harpoon Once

(Moshi Moshi)

By Phil Burt. In stores Oct 12

(4AD)

By Nathan Westley. In stores Oct 19

(Young Turks)

By Kate Parkin. In stores Sept 28

A Place To Bury Strangers

Vitalic

Logos

With one half of The Drums heralding from America’s Sunshine State, and the year’s peppiest season providing the title for this 7-track mini album, it’s pretty safe to predict that this quartet are not ones for morose, gloom and doom indie, even if their moving to Brooklyn suggests otherwise. No, their upbeat, poppy melodies master the tightrope between sweet and sickly, drawing attention away from the - at times – regretful lyrics and making you realise that life isn’t all that bad. First single and easily the band’s strongest track - ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ manages to reclaim whistling after Peter, Bjorn and John sucked (or blew) the life out of it, while ‘Saddest Summer’ sounds like upbeat Shins and ‘I Felt Stupid’ has the rite de passage innocence befitting a group who met at summer camp.This band could be big, that is if the ice cream doesn’t melt too soon.

Solo projects have a tendency to be an escape route for songs that don’t quite fit the mould of the performer’s main ensemble; it’s a tradition Bradford Cox, reclusive singer/songwriter in Atlanta four piece Deerhunter has stuck with on this, his second solo offering. The kind of lively, vibrant, leftfield guitar-led indie pop his vocals usually grace is waved away, with him instead embracing a more subdued, reflective manner. It is a move that has resulted in an album that has an almost ghostly spirit running through its core.Very much like Sparklehorse’s ‘Good Morning Spider’ it bines fragile haunting vocals to a minimal psych-folk backing that is susceptible to the occasional M83 shoegazer-ish electronic flourish to keep it texturally rich. Peculiar, often surreal and otherworldly, it is an album to enjoy.

Following on from his cult classic EP, Kid Harpoon’s debut album has been 3 years in the making.

One of few remnants of previous releases is folksy jangle ‘Flowers By The Shore’ and owing much of his song-writing prowess to his love of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, title track ‘Once’ holds onto that dark brooding quality. But working with producer Trevor Horn notable for work with the Pet Shop Boys and Paul McCartney has meant the rough edges that have always given Harpoon’s songs their charm have been polished to high gloss sheen, and, in aiming for more commercial echelons, single ‘Stealing Cars’ lacks sufficient soul within its Jack Penate shoe shuffle.

For many of Kid Harpoon’s fans this will be the album they’ve waited so long for, but for plenty of others, unscripted moments like ‘Hold On’ are just too few and far between.

By Edgar Smith. In stores Oct 5

(Pias)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores Sept 28

While it would be churlish not to welcome a glut of bands that wear their love of Mary Chain, Joy Division, Kevin Shields et al on their sleeves, music in 2009 can sometimes feel like suckling on a reassuring sonic nipple and it can be easy to ignore the substance (or lack thereof) beneath those swampy feedback avalanches. First time round, APTBS, with a heavy dose of noise, lights and smoke at their lightshows, and an album that relied a little too much on compressed-the-fuck-out-of fuzz and Slowdive-esque ‘Fall down/ around’ ‘your eyes/so high’ type wordage, certainly aroused suspicions.While the acid shoegazers again seem to know what they’re doing a little too well, there’s more variety of texture to contend with and, just like last time, some great songs. Of Note: ‘In Your Heart’, ‘Smile When You Smile’ and ‘Keep Slipping Away’.

For four years it has been quiet on Pascal Arbez-Nicolas’ – aka Vitalic’s – front, but this month, one of electro’s most loved and least rivalled figures returns.While his 2001 ‘Poney’ EP helped kick start the “electrock” storm that swept Justice to stardom, ‘Flashmob’ creeps up on you and slyly guides you to the dancefloor rather than grab you by your sweaty locks and drill a KORG-synth-shaped hole in your eardrum.While there’s no obvious pop hit like ‘My friend Dario’ to be found, ‘Second Lives’ is a straight-up banger out of the Ed Banger textbook. First single ‘Your Disco Song’ is oddly reminiscent of Crystal Castles’ ‘Crimewave’, but quickly develops its own dark tint. Arbez-Nicolas has a knack for getting the listener’s attention, and ‘Flashmob’’s 13 tracks make sure it rarely fades.

Vitalic looks set to not only catch but overtake those he inspired.

Mumford & Sons Sigh No More (Island)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Oct 5

09/10

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Flashmob

Exploding Head (Mute)

In essence, Mumford & Sons are an acoustically based, folk rock band. But as the three remarkable EP’s released over the past year, and now this, their debut album proves, the somewhat narrow tag tells only a fraction of the story.Their music is no twee, banjo-twiddling affair, or the wistful outpourings of a lovesick folkie - it’s huge, passionate, broken-hearted and furious.

Mumford & Sons are a folk rock band in the Arcade Fire sense.

If you’ve seen this band live, you’ll already be a convert. At their best, they have the capacity to be almost spiritually good, to plunge you into a wild emotional whirlpool from which you emerge drained, but joyous. ‘Sigh No More’ is an album that follows suit.

Reworked versions of the lead tracks

and others from the band’s earlier EPs feature here, alongside a handful of newly recorded efforts, and producer du jour Markus Dravs has lost none of the raw power of the band’s live shows; the songs are bigger than ever. On ‘White Blank Page’, frontman Marcus’ vocals, blistered and suffused with passion, tear out – challenging and accusatory – before a torch-carrying, cathartic climax. And if that is the album’s soul laid bare, then ‘Thistle and Weeds’ is its throbbing heart, building from a quiet trickle, to surge and flood.

The strength of the songwriting is stunning. One or two quieter moments provide some relief from the emotional intensity but in ‘Sigh No More’ the band have produced an album that is forged in fire, hope and tragedy on a biblical scale.

Folk rock is violently, unpredictably alive, challenging how we define the often wet genre, and Mumford & Sons are its flagbearing masters.

07/10

06/10

07/10

05/10

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Big Boss Man

Wolfmother

Maps

The Twilight Sad

Ólafur Arnalds

Full English Beat Breakfast

Cosmic Egg

Turning The Mind

Forget The Night Ahead

Found Songs

(Blow Up)

By Mandy Drake. In stores now

(Island)

By Kate Parkin. In stores Oct 19

(Mute)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Sept 28

(Fat Cat)

By Edgar Smith. In stores Oct 5

(Erased Tapes)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores now

Wound up in a band named after the campest wrestler in WWF history? It’s fine - simply name your album after a fry-up to pull focus and then photograph a ‘full English’ for your cover to follow suit.To rectify Big Boss Man’s overwhelming aesthetic gashness, this, their third album, needs to suplex the shit out of the Hammond beat world it sits in. So, without further a due, let 60’s soul instrumentals (‘Triumph Of The Olympian’) lay the smack down and Booker T receive a boot to the face from ‘Green Onions’’s sleazier sibling (‘Beat Breakfast’), before Big Boss Man’s Zombie-esque psyche organ pop pins you in the ring for the three count.Yes, it all goes a bit Austin Powers in a crude “Shagadelic Baby,Yeaaaah” kinda way, but more often than not ‘Full English Beat Breakfast’ will knock you flat on your back and boogaloo a victory lap.

‘Cosmic Egg’ is the hairy Australian rockers second album in 4 years, following the meltdown of the band in 2008. After a near total overhaul, only singer Andrew Stockdale remains of the original line-up. Opener ‘California Queen’ can easily take on the wanton thrash of ‘Woman’, as Stockdale’s screeching vocals play around over Kasabian style basslines. Borrowing from the stuttering riffs of fellow Ozzies AC/DC, ‘White Feather’ is then pure 80’s rock kitsch, and busting out some serious shredding, ‘10,000 Feet’ steers them nicely away from Darkness territory. All is far from perfect though and slower moments like ‘In the Morning’ are excruciatingly cheesy. In today’s hardened times we all need a band who don’t take themselves too seriously, the problem is that Wolfmother most probably do, like a Guitar Hero champ who thinks he’s Hendrix.

Maps’ debut album garnered a Mercury nomination, so expectations will be high for this second offering from one-man electronica obsessive James Chapman. ‘Turning The Mind’ has a tendency for semi-epic builds and drawn-out endings, with one or two tracks which nicely break up the flow. ‘I Dream Of Crystal’’s breathy vocals are oddly like Hot Chip covering British Sea Power, while ‘Let Go Of The Fear’ is a buzzy electronic stomper, claustrophobic and disorientating.

Then there’s ‘Love Will Come’, which isn’t far from straight-out nineties rave. For the most part though, a somewhat hazy atmosphere settles over this record like a mist, through which occasional patches of bright euphoric melody burst through like sunshine. Drifting slightly in its second half, ‘Turning The Mind’ is a slice of synth-drenched majesty.

Goodness, this is Scottish! James Graham’s accent is so intensely Caledonian it can’t help but be a main, and sometimes overwhelming, feature of his band’s second LP.The vocal consistently spins itself out over an equally constant backdrop of the band’s widescreen indie meets MBVesque guitar rumble.The problem is that this palette never really changes. After nicely paced opener ‘Reflection of the Television’, the thing trudges on and on, the tracks following instrumental dreamscape ‘Scissors’ feeling like a second album from a worse band. And, seeing as we’re on a slating tip, the mood and lyrics are so emotionally charged that after ten minutes only the psychologically damaged bedroom hermits will be singing and crying along. So, while 12-16 year olds still exist, don’t be surprised if The Twilight Sad stick around.

For his ‘Found Songs’ project, Icelandic composer and producer Ólafur Arnalds churned out a song a day for 7 days and whacked them on Twitter, encouraging fans to contribute their own artwork.

Listening to the collected songs, released as a mini-album by the small but charming Erased Tapes label (those responsible for prime minimal cinematic pop and delicate IDM), it is easy to imagine how people would be moved to create visual art fitting Arnalds’ instrumental music.The sparse electronics never get in the way of the piano melodies, the strings add an ethereal touch and the conciseness of pieces like ‘Erla’s Waltz’ and ‘Ljósi_’ make ‘Found Songs’ seem more like a collection of musical short stories rather than songs. And while there isn’t a lot in the way of hooks, its evocative qualities and atmosphere make for a lovely autumn record.

Fuck Buttons Tarot Sport (ATP)

By Sam Walton. In stores Oct 12

07/10

A quick Fuck Buttons crash course: two bedroom electronica mavericks with screwy imaginations make a Mogwaimeets-acid-house debut on homemade equipment.The result, ‘Street Horrrsing’, is relentless, pulsating, brittle, often terrifying and frequently beautiful, and quite unlike what’s been before. Now, for round two, the pair have toughened up, but at the expense of much of the tension and fragility that accompanied their debut.

Gone are the feral yelps and clattering, arrhythmic drums; in their place a new feeling of control. Gone is the sense of no one, not least the band, having much idea of what happens next; in its place a deliberate sense of planning and composition. It’s clearly the same musicians, but with altered ambitions, and

behind the bulk of these changes is producer Andy Weatherall, whose ‘Screamadelica’-tinged fingerprints are all over these tracks for better and for worse.

The outcome is a more finely crafted record than ‘Street Horrrsing’, whose peaks, particularly the mesmerising ‘Flight of the Feathered Serpent’, surpass those of its predecessor. However, the duo’s diminished punk mentality also allows tracks to meander – most noticeably on ‘Olympians’, the LP’s dull centrepiece, which has more interest in a lucrative BBC ident or car advert than the pugilism and uncompromising terror of Fuck Buttons at their best.

All this is not to say, however, that ‘Tarot Sport’ isn’t a toweringly impressive piece of work in its own right – it is, for its boldness to open with a track (‘Surf Solar’) that’s almost 11 minutes long, if nothing else – but nonetheless there’s more than a hint of a once wild beast having been tamed. www.loudandquiet.com

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Live

Offset Festival ▼

Hainault Forest Country Park 05-06.09.2009

By Stuart Stubbs Pics by Owen Richards except for Male Bonding, shot by weknowwhatyoudidlastnight.com

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Just as this morning’s flour fight had been forgiven, Male Bonding arrive. Cue swan dives from speaker stacks, safety barriers crumpled and twisted under excited feet and a late siege by large men in fluorescent bibs. “Loud And Quiet’s getting a little bit moshy” had been the wonderfully calm radio callout to police this mischief, but security are too late. Male Bonding have ripped through our L&Q-hosted tent like a ‘Bleach’ era Nirvana playing visceral pop punk. Already they’ve been mobbed by daft grinning faces and forced to tiptoe over fans that wrestle between their monitors like oversized kittens.They’ve joined in when Teen Sheikhs singer Andy fought to the front of the stage to sing ‘Molly’s Lips’ over cheers and feedback, and now they’re exited, having filled Offset’s largest tent at 6pm. All that’s left for the officials to see are smiling fans politely helping each other back to the side of the barriers they should be on. Nothing to see here… not for another half an hour, anyway.

Elsewhere on site, Offset Festival is

celebrating turning 2 with the return of last year’s essential gloom/noise tent, Experimental Circle Club (your first stop for walls of sound as dark as the homemade black bunting hanging inside, a must-see kraut-fuzz set from primal programmers Advert and a Kap Bambino performance so chaotic that “a little bit moshy” certainly wouldn’t have covered it), a main stage for The Horrors to battle against (their Sunday night closing set is sadly plagued with equipment gremlins that finally beat the Southenders down) and a new addition in the form of a hardcore tent playing home to Throats, Dead Swans and legendary skatepunks The Stupids.There’s a vintage clothes fair, a comedy tent, a new bands stage and a Nuke Em All-curated dance tent; organic food stalls, the best dressed punters this side of Henley Regatta, oh yes, and – in line with last year’s launch – a lineup that leaves most other festivals red faced.

Opening our tent for example isn’t ‘next year’s Wombats’ but rather this year’s Phil

Spector. Spectrals (Louis Jones in the studio, Louis and friend on stage) launches his reverbheavy surf pop by gently casting off his ghostly doo-wop and watching it bob about our ears.

It’s his second gig, short and sweet, and crowned with the sombre lyrics/jolly guitar meanderings of ‘Leave Me Be’. A sound problem or two aside, it’s a perfect start to our day.

Then is the aforementioned ‘flour-gate’, brought on by the hands of 60’s garage trio Speak & The Spells – L&Q favourites for their fixed ‘give a wank’ shrugs as well as their brilliant Sonics-esque surf punk.They zip through the kind of tracks that The Horrors could have before they ‘went kraut’, finish on soon-to-be debut single ‘She’s Dead’ and then – naturally – have an onstage flour fight. It’s nothing a broom can’t fix, we clap, the band jump on each other and roll off stage.The problem is, we’re dead wrong about the broom, and while we are clapping sound engineers are clenching (fists and buttocks). Flour, FYI, is one hell of an electrical conductor, y’see, and right

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Thee Vicars Boston Music Rooms, Tufnell Park 27.08.2009

By Polly Rappaport ▼

If you’re going to hurl yourself arse over tits into a drum kit, you might as well go for a kit that belongs to someone else – like the record label that’s running the night. Dirty Water veterans Thee Vicars are working the jam-packed Boston Music Rooms into a delirious sweat with their trademark garage punk – a rowdy mash-up of frenzied guitar finger work, kicking the shit out of chunky four-chord undertones, which would sound like ‘four pissed up kids’ (see their MySpace) were it were not so sharp and freakishly authentic. Many songs, such as set opener ‘Baby Come On Home’, sound like the Sonics being played at double speed, virtually every hyperactive surf guitar lick being punctuated by an electric-shock yelp. Bluesy stomper, ‘Mr Operator’, sets the crowd off jiving and shoving whilst Rev’s Mike, Chris and Marcus throw artfully jerky, moptop-swinging shapes, seemingly seeing who can play the fastest and display the best moves at once. Bratty, wound-up Kinks cover, ‘You Really Got Me’, inspires the first of many stage invasions, one Vicar goes for a thrash about in the audience and another climbs Dirty Water’s drums. And it’s still sounding tight.

Not bad for four pissed up kids.

now it’s everywhere.

By the time Manchester’s Mazes are granted access to the stage we’ve had an hour of dusting down nooks and crannies to ensure plugging in is shock free and doesn’t result in the uncontrollable dropping of guts, and the trio with no desire to entertain low end prove their Lo-fi garage to be the grooviest (in a non ‘yeeeaaah baby!’ way) on the bill.Tracks like ‘Bowie Knives’ swash and swagger like ‘All The Young Dudes’ played through a tin can telephone; ‘Summer Hitz (Main Dyke)’ is 2 minutes of twisting about in the best Budweiser advert ever. Mazes are worth the wait, and Brighton garage band Teen Sheikhs are tailor-made to snatch the Lo-fi baton next.

Pre-‘Molly Lips’, Andy is growling/ slurring his own lyrics, like “Don’t touch me, I’m sick”.To Speak & The Spells he suggests “leave the cooking at home”, shortly after snapping his guitar string and putting out a call to borrow someone else’s.That Male

Bonding’s Jon doesn’t need to be asked twice before he’s handing over his Telecaster sums up the atmosphere of the Loud And Quiet tent today. Flour’s a lethal bastard, but everyone else here are either old friends or new fans (Andy rushed onsite especially to see Spectrals and was suitably impressed, for example). And that’s an ethos that applies to the whole of Offset.When Metronomy are upgraded to the main stage due to the impressive too-big-for-a-tent crowd they pull on Saturday night, first across Hainault Forest Country Park to ensure a prime vantage point is ex-band member Gabriel Stebbing; watching S.C.U.M’s pretentious entrance to classical music on Sunday afternoon is Faris Badwan; helping crowd surfer 162 offstage after Male Bonding is oversized wrestling kitten 004. In short, everyone’s friends at Offset because everyone is thankful that a festival finally exists that puts original new music above £160 tickets, ropey hotdogs and samey headline sets.

Major Lazer Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, Hoxton 08.09.2009

By Kate Hutchinson ▼

Super producers Switch and Diplo bounded out of Kingston with such promise as their alter-ego Major Lazer, brandishing a debut album of digi-dancehall tracks featuring a clutch of fast-chatting toasters from the Jamaican underground. But when they try to recreate an authentic dancehall show live, it’s borderline cringeworthy rather than cleverly tongue-in-cheek.They do their best to conjure similar hysteria to their chaotic Carniva set in an uncomfortable Hoxton pit, where the sweat from someone else’s brow drips into your pint.Two

fantastic female dancers and a suave body-popper up the ante amid Diplo and Switch’s globallyinformed sonic reach-around, but their bolshy MC, Skerrit Bwoy, pushes the sexed-up performance too far. Some think he’s hilarious as he rides girls across the stage and, at the end, boastfully brandishes a bag of “ganja”, but others wince at the crassness.Yes, he’s poking fun at the ‘bad man’ aspect of dancehall culture, but it’s a boisterous overload that gets, well, boring – especially as you can barely dance to the rest of it. Diplo and Switch impatiently cut up tracks – far too quickly to shuffle in time to – and instead focus on dropping hooks that’ll get them cheers, from Rusko’s familiar ‘Cockney Thug’ to Crookers’ groan-worthy ‘Day N Nite’. Sadly, it feels like style has stolen the riddims of substance tonight.

Wooden Shjips The Borderline, Soho 19.08.2009

By Edgar Smith ▼

I wasn’t alive in the sixties and I’ve never been to America, but oh, if only today’s mega-selling headliners could sound like this.

According to Louis Theroux’s latest BBC adventure, the Arniefeaturing tourism adverts and the combined moanings of ace San Diego new-comers Wavves and Crocodiles, California is a very boring place for anyone who doesn’t love moneyed superficiality, surfing and/or crystal meth.

However, this seems to have inspired bands of this boring decade,Wooden Shjips included, to capture the essence of the State’s glory days, proving that rock and roll can transcend time and context. Hurray! Plastering over a motorik rhythm section that recalls the gloriously repetitive thump of Neu! And Suicide with dense guitar lines and organ stabs, the San Franciscans whirl through an hour and a half set in what seems like twenty minutes. It starts with ‘Aquarian Time’ and ‘Fallin’’ from their excellent new album and stays at an almost constant level of intensity, the tempo shifting between songs providing contrast, reeling you deeper and deeper in.

Set against do-not-adjust-yourTV-set visuals, their jams, which

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HEALTH. Pic: PAUL CAUDELL

Die! Die! Die! Pic: KELDA HOLE

Major Lazer. Pic: GARETH DRAKE

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include an impossibly rapturous Spacemen Three cover, are kicked out in a heady, wah-ridden fashion; almost telepathically tight and incredibly loud, the sound of a modern day Stooges emerging from a smack binge with a grain of Truth/

loveliness. But it’ll still be warped and only the foolish wouldn’t go with them.

HeALTH

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The Lexington, Islington 26.08.2009

By Phil Burt

When Meric Long and Logan Kroeber (awesome name alert on both counts) – aka The Dodos – played Munich earlier this year, they did so to an audience of 30: a bit of a letdown considering the critical accolades heaped on their second album, ‘Visitor’. Luckily for the Californian folk/punk/ psycho-pop duo (supported by an extra percussionist), London has prepared well and filled out Bush Hall, but the performance, although pleasant and sometimes even engaging, prompts a few too many sneaky looks at mobile phone screens for it to be a success.

There are only so many ways to syncopate a 4/4-beat, but Kroeber (a dead ringer for Rivers Cuomo) does his best to try them all, rattling and clattering away at his bass-drum-less kit with an impressive energy and precision, while Long’s bookish baritone lends a Shins-esque touch to the newer, more psychedelic ‘Time to Die’ material. Punters bored by the repetitive dynamic and tone of the songs are appeased by a double whammy of hits during the encore – the catchy hooks of ‘Red and Purple’ and the irresistible alt-folk jewel ‘Fools’ are accompanied by more dancing and singing than the entire preceding 50 minutes.

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“Erm…I guess now’s a good time for us to show a bit of gratitude.

Thanks.” Begin a thirty-second bout of crashing symbols and hazy screams.This is HEALTH, here rounding off their UK tour with a secret gig to a privileged 150 people. And from Jake’s coy welcome, they dazzle and hypnotise for the next forty minutes, slotting their new ‘commercial’ (yeah, right) tracks in between the usual abrasive excellence of oldies like ‘Crimewave’ and ‘Tricaratops’.The tight precision and close concentration of the four LA’ers fire us into their world of mournful murmurings, primitive beats and thrashing guitars that manage to sound like Terminator with a soar head on ‘Tabloid Sores’.

In this world there is no need for inane chatter to neighbours to pass the time. Instead all eyes are fixed on the stage as the crowd nods and bumps along in serious muso fashion, before attempting to emulate John’s snaking hips through ‘Die Slow’. But while Jake’s guttural screams, Jupiter’s manic sex face and John’s thrusting pelvis are mesmerising, the true centre point of the band is drummer BJ who ceremoniously raises his sticks above his head before echoing the crowds’ quickening heartbeat with his ritualistic drumming. Much has been said about the new direction of this band - fully formed/less avant-garde songs and wot-not but nothing demonstrates how much of a natural progress latest album ‘Get Color’ is than a live show that sits the ravey (‘We Are Water’, ‘Die Slow’) next to the crazy (everything from ‘HEALTH’). If the downbeat and ethereal closing ‘In Violet’ points to where HEALTH are heading next, it might be into a world of

The dodos Bush Hall, Shepherds Bush 03.09.2009

By Matthias Scherer

She Keeps Bees The Wilmington Arms, Farringdon 10.09.2009

By Reef Younis ▼

I’m in love. Not just fleeting physical attraction – although there’s that in abundance – I’m just besotted with the raw, spirited presence of Jessica Larrabee and She Keeps Bees. Imagine PJ Harvey howling at the moon combined with the porcelain power of Howling Bells front lady, Juanita Stein, and you might get close to Jessica’s soulful Brooklyn sass. Despite the audible chatter

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from the back corners of the Wilmington’s confines, her natural pizzazz and feistiness battles through with endearingly entertaining success.Visibly a little nervous, but flying at a hundred miles an hour, her offbeat snippets about eating whole mozzarella balls like apples are nestled amongst a liberal smattering of curses, random familial antidotes and a surging set of sparse, stripped to the bone blues rock that Dan Auerbach would happily call his own. Crushes aside, the duo might not carry the primal sexual charge of The Kills but they’ve got the testy couple dynamic down to a delightful tee – she with the chatterbox potty mouth and rampant internal monologue intermittently shared between tune ups, and he with the strong, silent ‘you’re causing a scene’ boyfriend poker face. But from the first clinical bass drum kick or jagged blues chord, Jessica’s a flailing raven-haired, sultry banshee, wailing and caterwauling to match the hostility of her hammered guitar chords.Working through tracks from their brilliant debut, ‘Nests’, in a forty-minute blaze, live and amplified, She Keeps Bees doldrums leave you resoundingly stung.

Die! Die! Die! Buffalo Bar, Islington 08.09.2009

By Chris Watkeys ▼

We catch Die! Die! Die! at the outset of a mammoth European tour.The underground shoebox that is the Buffalo Bar is the perfect environment to trap and amplify their taught, tight rhythms, but, somewhat bafflingly, it’s only twothirds full. DDD are a band who, to put it mildly, like to get the party started when they’re on stage, and they do their best to spike this crowd into life, daring them to match their own unhinged energy.

Frontman Andrew Wilson stands side-on to the mic, assaulting his instrument, ripping out those dynamic and at times slightly feminine vocals; sometimes his voice sounds unearthly and disconnected, floating above the music like a ghost above a riot.

Meanwhile, bassist Lachlan pogos and drummer Mikey near drowns in a sea of his own sweat, but

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somehow it’s not quite enough.

The line between band and audience is a thin one here, and Wilson loves to cross it, going walkabout during a raucous ‘A.T.T.I.T.U.D.’. If only the crowd wasn’t quite so tame, the feral majesty of this band would be magnified, but at the end of it all, half-hearted calls for an encore are met with Wilson’s response, “Don’t make me get personal” - which says it all.

Three Trapped Tigers Digital, Brighton 10.09.2009

By Nathan Westley ▼

For just three people, tech fiends Three Trapped Tigers make a hell of a lot of noise; a thunderous amount that will leave other bands firmly quaking in their weather worn boots. Much like ¡Forward Russia!, they have seen fit to do away with conventionally naming songs and resort to employing a numerical system – a wise move when you consider that lyrics do not ever grace their music.Yet tonight the band demonstrate that they are not an instrumental band reliant on one trick best suited to the margins of society; they are instead a multilimbed, highly functioning machine whose appeal can stretch much further than a select few.

TTT reach the techy Thom Yorkes, the sleeveless rockers and the dance heads. Unleashed onto a largely unsuspecting audience they twist and turn their way through a complicated, ever-shifting barrage of musical opuses that are rich in sonic textures, the low end penetrative bass lines that underpin jamming tracks breaking through the skin and reverberate around, assaulting inside cavities while eyes lay transfixed on the three figures onstage. It’s as if they have taken Mogwai’s post-rock blueprint and given it a PHD level makeover by bolting on helpings of 65 Days Of Static and Aphex Twin style noise, mathematical time structures and multilayered dynamics.They dress in anti-fashion IT chic and their math rock grooves are full on and relentless, but experiencing it first hand is one unlike any other instrumental band you’ve seen in a long time.

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Wave Machines Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, Hoxton 09.09.2009

By Edgar Smith ▼

Wave Machines wear masks when they play live. It’s a gimmick, but however meaningless and distracting it might seem, they actually pull it off with panache; the masks are of the players’ own faces (symbolic and disturbing optical illusion rather than a distraction then) and instead of keeping them on religiously like an indie-picnic Slipknot, they remove them gradually as they get too hot. It’s this down-to-earth and stylish turn they give to what feels like over-familiar elements that make Wave Machines so likeable.

It’s not immediately obvious upon hearing their music, a blend of curious and trinkets indie-pop and folktronic white funk, but the whole is in fact a sea of subtle details crafted with a great deal of care and technique. A drum machine provides an upper layer of unkit-like clicks and clacks, all four members sing (well), and wield at least two instruments at a time, enabling a satisfyingly deep pop texture. Songs that can sound twee on record (notably first single ‘I Go, I Go, I Go’), are given the sonic steroid treatment with bouts of controlled noise, and the set is paced so well that by the penultimate and excellent ‘Punk Spirit’ (the UNKLE-referencing video is well worth a Google) they’ve reached a genuine emotional summit.They could be mid-thirties by the time they’re on T4, but we’ll be watching.

Golden Animals Jericho Tavern, Oxford 19.08.2009

By Tom Goodwyn ▼

Whoever invented psychedelia has a lot to answer for.Though created with the noblest of intentions – smashing boundaries, pushing envelopes, daring to be epic, that sort of thing – it can also be given as a dog ate my homework excuse for a truckload of mindless fretwanking or copying and pasting straight from 1967. In the case of Golden Animals, the Brooklynbased duo of Tommy Eisner and Linda Beecroft, they are guilty on

endless counts of the latter charge.

Taking advantage of a free week between festival new bands tent appearances, Golden Animals manage to attract a modest crowd to boho Oxford. However, once the opening reverb starts to descend, all attempts at audience interaction (or even acknowledgement) are gone.The pair plod through their set with the likes of ‘Ride Easy’ and ‘Steady Roller’ sounding particularly apt.

The whole set, in fact Golden Animals as a whole, has the feel of doing the absolute minimum. On record the songs plagiarise wholesale from The Doors, Hendrix and other psychedelic safe bets, and live, the band just look like they are counting down the minutes ‘till they can get off the stage. A massive disappointment.

bad for Lazarus Engine Rooms, Brighton 23.08.2009

By Nathan Westley ▼

It is difficult to escape the past as it has this tendency to creep up on you when you least expect it. For musicians, shifting from one project to the next it is a naturalistic act that is even harder to dodge; comparisons to your previous work is unavoidable. Bad For Lazarus are a band that are going to find themselves in this situation time after glorious time, and the reason is simple – singer and band leader Rich Fownes, once of psychobilly dabbling rockers Eighties Matchbox, briefly of NIN and current UNKLE touring guitarist. A transition that has seen him depart the trusty sideman role and fully take control of the reigns, tonight sees Fownes fronting in a sweaty basement venue.Though they don’t strut the exact same line, Bad For Lazarus come agonisingly close to replicating the hard-hitting, unhinged bombastic flow of a rallying Matchbox set.The performance is fuelled by passion and entails one brutal rocking riff following another, until ears are bashed to within an inch of being broken.There is little doubting that BFL are a little rough round the edges (that name could be smoothed out for starters); they are after all a band still very much

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finding their feet, yet they have the capabilities to make a mark.

Whether they do so or not depends on whether their frontman can outrun his past, and stranger things have certainly happened – Charlie from Fightstar apparently used to be in a boy band.

Magazine Royal Festival Hall, Southwark 01.09.2009

By Natalie Shaw ▼

Howard Devoto would smirk if I told him how brilliant he was. I love this band, which is why tonight baffles me so.The first half is a case of the heartbreak.Why put the tight and unpredictably dynamic forefathers of guitarmusic, Magazine, in a seated venue? Why can’t I hear the lyrics and why’re the guitars too quiet? It has the sense of a masterclass, a going through the motions – Dave Formula’s keyboards on ‘I Want To Burn Again’ are lithe rather than sweeping; even ‘A Song From Under The Floorboards’’ layered syncopation is recreated without allure. Post-interval, it’s all change; Magazine are phenomenal.The sound is neater, the lyrics are back and the frontman is parading once again. Sound issues are partially abated and suddenly the band look more robust.The audience are on their feet by the end for a phenomenal rendition of the mystifying ‘Definitive Gaze’ followed by the still-startling “I will drug you and fuck you” callout on ‘Permafrost’. It’s an interactive and real performance, with just enough distance.Verdict?

The first half is devastating, but the Satanic ending even more so – just for all the right reasons.

Her name is calla Buffalo Bar, Islington 19.08.2009

By Holly Emblem ▼

Returning after a short hiatus, Her Name is Calla offer up a blisteringly visceral performance on a particularly hot summer night at the Buffalo Bar.The across country based sextet mainly perform songs from their mini-

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album ‘The Heritage’, with the repeating motif of a lost boy, which features in songs such as the desolate ‘New England’, gaining particular resonance in the dark, close-quarters den that is this north London basement venue.

However, the Radiohead-ish collective also prove they’ve been busy during their respite, performing the haunting and choral ‘Pour More Oil’ from their recent ‘A Blood Promise’ EP.Their ability to combine yearning vocals with throbbing, aggressive and soaring instrumentals continually prove that innovation is still possible within a genre wrongly considered to be worn out and, with the addition of violin and trumpet, live they now have a fuller and ultimately more affecting sound.Whilst label mates such as Worriedaboutsatan may currently be garnering an impressive amount of critical approval (and rightly so), bright things should be expected from ‘Calla’s soon-to-be-released debut album.

Cate le bon The Garage, Islington 14.09.2009

By Tom Goowyn ▼

Cate Le Bon has been skirting the peripheries of hipster consciousness for some time now, charming crowds with her dark hearted ditties, in both English and Welsh. Now wielding a debut album and a good deal more exposure following her collaboration with Super Furry Animals offshoot Neon Neon, you get the feeling that soon she’ll be headlining bigger venues than the one she plays support to William Elliot Whitmore in tonight. She certainly looks and sounds confident, and, clearly buoyed by a decent turnout for her slot. ‘Me Oh My’, with its lilting chords and curveball electro section, echoes a coarser Cat Power with adder punch; ‘Eyes So Bright’ a windswept Carole King; ‘Hollow Trees House Hounds’ a vintage PJ Harvey. Continuing to grow into a fine performer, she’s one of equal parts intimate and entertaining. It’s over too quickly but, like Florence Welch and Laura Marling, Le Bon is one of the most exciting singer songwriters the UK is currently lucky enough to have. www.loudandquiet.com

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film

By DEAN DRISCOLL

Why you should put your trust in peter bradshaw

Pixar’s UP

Cinema Preview While there’s a burning desire here to devote this month’s entire cinema preview to the epoch-making martial arts action-comedy Kung Fu Flid, there are (regrettably) a few films that demand closer examination than the movie Kung Fu Flid, which despite called Kung Fu Flid is only being granted a limited UK release on September 28th.

One such movie is The Soloist (released September 25th). Joe Wright’s follow-up to Atonement treads a similar award-baiting path to its predecessor yet has been strangely shifted around the release schedules.

Originally slated for release in the run-up to this year’s awards season, the delays prompted whispers of a loss of confidence in the true-life tale, which stars Jamie Foxx as a schizophrenic homeless violin genius and Robert Downey Jr as the journalist telling his courageous story. Reviews have been fulsome in praise for the performances of its lead actors and of Wright’s direction, yet where it falls down would perhaps be down to a general air of boredom with the typical awards fare of real-life tales and grandiose heartstringpullers.When the apparent best of that bunch is the not-nearly-as-curious-as-it-ought-to-have-been Case of Benjamin Button, maybe it really is the right time for the Academy to embrace a wider range of movies by upping the number of nominees to ten, as it will for the 2010 awards.

A movie that is almost certain to benefit from this move is Pixar’s latest, Up (October 9th), which manages once again the studio’s trick of creating unlikely heroes with an appeal to both children and

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adults alike. Pixar have turned ageism on its head in creating the character of Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner, a veteran actor with a career spanning 6 decades. Oh and he played Santa in Elf). Fredricksen is a curmudgeonly former balloon salesman who decides to live out the dreams of he and his late wife by travelling the world, using his balloon-suspended home as his preferred mode of transport and unknowingly bringing a clumsy boy-scout named Russell along for the ride. Perhaps the only studio that has become a movie star in its own right, Pixar’s impeccable standards are set to be in place once more, with an opening section that even outdoes Wall-E for emotional impact.

Released on the same day is Shane Meadow’s latest, Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee, starring the magnetic Paddy Considine as the clueless manager of an aspiring rapper from the midlands. It’s Meadows & Considine, which is as close to a guarantee of quality as you can get in UK film-making these days.With that in mind, watch out for Ricky Gervais’ latest US effort The Invention of Lying, another high-concept comedy which we’re hoping will be a better than the anaemic Ghost Town. His next movie after that is a return to his Reading roots for Cemetery Junction, which looks like it may be a promising return to The Office form.

This month’s cinema highlights: September 25th: The Soloist September 28th: Kung Fu Flid October 2nd: The Invention of Lying October 9th: Up, Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee

In these days of web 2.0, everybody’s a reviewer.With forums, blogs, Facebook,Twitter, Myspace, news story comments, the chance to offer instantaneous reactions to movies, music,TV, a recent bowel movement, etc. is available to all.This is said to be contributing to the death of arts criticism, when in fact it should make real criticism more important than ever: it comes down to a question of trust – into whose hands can you put your cinema-going life? (This column isn’t deluded enough to pretend that we’re your only port of call...)

Mark Kermode remains the most entertaining UK critic on television and radio - and the most infuriating - with his weekly podcast being required listening for anyone who enjoys discussing movies – even if that discussion will more often than not be particularly one-sided. But when it comes to the crunch,The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw is the man with whom to entrust your next cinema visit. His calling card is the one-star review, but rather than impotent ranting at the brainlessness of modern mainstream cinema, (Bradshaw is as open to fluffy entertainment as anyone) – it’s the films with witless pretension that come in for most disdain, with Bradshaw using wit rather than rage to take them down a peg or ten. Like any truly great critic, he doesn’t just live for slagging films off – his greatest moments come when he truly loves a movie: For an entertaining read, check out any of his fabled one-star efforts; for a joyous appraisal of what makes great cinema, check out one of his 5-star reviews - in particular you might want to seek out his There Will Be Blood nod, the best piece of film criticism this humble writer’s ever read.

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party wolf Photo Casebook“What’s the Story?”

I was so upset about the Oasis split, Rod. I had a big row with my bird about it. She said ‘They’re just a band!’. So I said, ‘No, they’re more than that!’ And she’s like, ‘No they’re not!’

I said...

horoscopes Virgo

I know, I know mate.

It’s like when The Faces split up. One man threw himself into the Thames he was so depressed

Posh sod! One dimensional tosspot! Dithering idiot! Rubbish hair! You’ve heard it all,Virgo, and yet such envious abuse is like piss off a tramp’s pants to you.You could charm the balls off a builder without a copy of the Daily Sport, because you have always been the sexiest of all the horoscopes.You’ve got your ‘A’ game and you stick to it, and so you should. Hell, I’m typing this with my semi-stiff junk right now, just thinking about you. Ok, stop! Here’s the thing: this month sees a massive test coming your way. A loved one will no longer be satisfied with stammering charms; they need you to commit. Face this now or end up rubbing it to a rom com til Christmas. Single?

Course you’re not!

Celebrity twitter See! Famous people are normal, just like us

That was you, Rod, and don’t interupt my story... I said, ‘Yes they are!’ So came back with, ‘No they’re not.’ In the end it got so heated we made love on your bed

LGallagher

Some fucker stole me phone & hacked my twitter. Ignore last two posts. Brixton’s shit. Hackney 2moz about 20 minutes ago from device

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I’ve got flabby man boobs about 6 hours ago from device

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My name is Liam and I’m a MASSIVE fairy.

I’m not even hard... and my t-shirts are gash! about 6 hours ago from device

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Want some more Morning Glory, babe?

Phoarrr!

You jammy git PW!

@RkidNoel Yeah, well how have I sold 4 Pretty Green Tees today then, nobhead?

Aye?! Wiping my own arse is easy!!! about 7 hours ago from device

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Soouund!!! Stall set up and ready to go. Got a safe spot next to Derek’s Shoe Repairs. BOSS about 8 hours ago from device

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Brixton market is beautifully still at 7am

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